
E 
ILOSOPHY 





PRED W. STOWEL^U 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 





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FRED \V. STOWELL, 



RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY 



BY 



FRED W. STOWELL 






The Trade Supplied by 
THE SAN FRANCISCO NEWS COMPANY 

SAN FRANCISCO. CAL. 



THE L'SRAWY »F 

CUNGRtaS, 
Two CoHea Receives 

APR. 22^902 


OOPYKIWHT eHTRr 

COPY a. 






1^^ 



COPYRIGHT 1902 



FRED W. vSTOWELL 



COMMERCIAL PUBllSHING CO., PRINTERS 

S. E. COR. Mission & First ST8.,S. f. 



CONTENTS: 

PAGE 

The Twentieth Century's Dream 9 

Nova Persei : 11 

Professor Pangnos and His Ideagraph H 

The Account 12 

The Analysis , li> 

Fallacy of Immortality 18 

Story' of a Keporter's Syndicate 23 

Tales from Tampa : 32 

The Scoop That Failed 32 

O'Shauglinessy and the Queen 34 

Censor and Correspondent 37 

Electric Cavern of Las Savinales 42 

Tale in Which the Moral is Made to Precede the Story 47 

Awheel to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado 52 

The Baile at Clifton: 63 

As It Was 63 

As It Might Have Been 64 

The Apacheid, an Arizona Epic of the Eighties 65 

Night in the Desert 67 

Cleopatra's Soliloquy 68 

BiOTOPSis, a Plagiarism After Bryant. 71 

Ragtime: 74 

In the Case of an American Dreyfus .... 74 

Honesty as a Handicap 77 

In the Matter of Oliiiations 80 

Brute Brawn and Brute Brain 81 

Of the Use of a Word 82 

Lynch Law, the Great American Referendum 83 

Poets of To-day, Yesterday and the Day Before 85 

Fraternity of the Frontier 99 



ILLUSTRATIONS: 

PAGE 

Frontispiece. 

" I'll Play My Signal Code upon a Eay of Light and Talk with Mars " 8 

Loitering on the Pier at Port Tampa 33 

Looking Toward Port Tampa 35 

Where They Gathered for Small Talk 36 

Transports Dressed for the Day 39 

A Characteristic Landscape in Florida 41 

A Storm in the Grand Canyon 53 

Looking Across the Grand Canyon from the Saddle of Ayer's Peak 55 

Ayer's Peak with Its Castellated Summit 57 

The Rider Gives His Wheel the Outer Post, the Place of Honor 59 

The Grand Canyon from Moran's Point 61 



INTRODUCTION : 

The writer presents in book form a collection of articles which 
may have a passing interest. Some of these have appeared in 
the daily press ; others in weekly publications. 

FRED W. STOWELL. 
San Francisco, April i, 1902. 




I'LL PLAY MY SIGNAL CODE UPON A RAY OF LIGHT AND TALK WITH MARS." 



Cbe Cwentletb Century's Dream. 



The Clwrubims sword from its keeper is wrested; 

With the flame of its hiade will I hIazo% my ivay 
Till the City of God hy my sciewce invested 

Shall hoist the white pennant, sign truce for a day. 



Stepping- from out the t^Yilig•ht of 
earth's morn 

With quickening- strides I hasten 
toward the full 

White luster of meridian. Prom- 
ise 

]My tolven is; my word I give to 
show 

The unfulfilled fulfilled, till Rea- 
son stand 

As nude as Truth, unbiased, un- 
ashamed. 



The TAventieth Century I. an op- 
timist. 

But not with unconditioned faith 
who sees 

Through Hope's bewildering eye 
the things as I 

Would have them be, nor let the 
vision so 

Pervert my judgment. 

Mine it is to wrench 
The shackles from the fettered 

brain; to loose 
The potent forces of the atom, 

where, 



Perhaps, may lie within its micro- 
cosm 

A world and all its little sophis- 
tries. 

The^ dust upon an insect's wing, 
the mote 

Still dancing in the day, may hold 
unleashed 

Some energy to hurl this globe 
outside 

Its pathway round the sun and 
drive afar 

Beyond Creation's realm of things 
that are 

Up to the veiy zone of Chaos, 
which 

Encircles Space behind the ulti- 
mate star. 

Mine shall it be to solve gray 

mysteries. 
ril play my signal code upon a 

ray 
Of light and talk with Mars. 

Planets shall be 
Like neigboring villages and the 

fixed stars 
Not gleaming points, but nightly 

discs disclose. 



10 



RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY 



The earthglow on the hidden Sweet, heavy vohime of the deep 

hemisphere siib-bass 

Shall picture l^ack one-half the Shall hear, and eyes no cogniz- 

secrets of ance that take 

The moon, and each vibrating Shall see above the violet ray. 

beam shall be Each sense 

\ messenger to bring nnblnrred May quicken till the brain shall 



its sure 
And faitliful copy. 

I will draAV the stings 
Of evil from the fetid, blackest 

cells 
Of sourest pessimism, until the 

mass 
Shall sweeten to a better purnose; 

from 
The ether's void a new creation 

call 
And build tlie links of evolution 

with 
Strange forms, strange life, 

strange elements that men 
]May grasp the hands of gods and 

comrades be. 



learn to tell 
The messages a million forms of 

force 
Since primal time have cast upon 

the screen 
Of life unread, till thought shall 

know itself. 
I'll seize the key of science and 

unlock 
Tlie rocks. The heart of things 

shall be as clear 
As now the surface is; the desert 

yield 
Its tilchings from the sun. 



It may be mine 
To strip the Tree of Knowledge 
almost bare, 
A solitude of beauty lies without And turn aside the Flaming 
The world of mind. Ears that Sword that keeps 

are deaf to the The way before the Tree of Life. 



Rust edges the sword that iras flaming and caustic; 

Set the fools hi their folly each free to engage, 
For the earth is an ancient; the dream of the gnostic 

Twists a vision of strengtli to tlie nightmare of age. 



nov>a Persei: 

Professor Pangnos and Ris Tdcagrapb. 



UPS ALA, :N'ov. 31. — In the Svenska Stjerna, which came from 
the press to-da}^, appears the most remarkable paper which has 
ever found place in a. scientific publication. It is from the pen 
of Professor Pangnos, considered the most learned man in all 
Sweden, the head of the Eoyal Swedish Astronomical Society and 
professor of astronomy in the University of Upsala. The Sven- 
ska Stjerna, in which the article is printed, is one of the most 
reliable scientific magazines in Europe. 

Briefly, Professor Pangnos professes to have established com- 
munication with other worlds. Testa's theory that recent electri- 
cal phenomena, observ^ed in the Rocky mountains, were the result 
of the efforts of the inhabitants of Mars to communicate with 
Earth is far surpassed by the daring statements of the Swedish 
astronomer, who claims to be in communication with a being 
whom he terms Alfomeg, dwelling on V, one of the minor plan- 
ets revolving about the star Nova in the constellation Perseus. 

Pangnos claims to communicate with Alfomeg by means of an 
instrument which he calls the ideagraph. He declares that with 
this communication is ahnost instant, and that across the great 
gulf of ether he can converse with no more sensible loss of time 
between question and response than in ordinary conversation by 
telephone between citizens dwelling remote from each other in 
Sweden. 

Pangnos claims to use a ray of light upon which to send his 
thoughts to x^lfomeg, and to receive answer by the same medium. 
Now it is well known that it takes years, some say centuries, for 
light starting from Nova to reach Earth, but Pangnos says that 
since the first Novan ray struck the earth there has been an in- 



12 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

finite continuance of rays, and once the light circuit is complete 
it serves as the medium, so that the ideagraph, sending its mes- 
sage out into space on a ray of light, covers the distance so rap- 
idly that it overtakes the light particles which have left earlier, 
even for centuries it may he, much as a telegraphic communica- 
tion is sent from a railway train in advance of train and pas- 
sengers. 

The talks between Pangnos and Alfomeg are set forth in full 
(talks is not the word, but there is no English equivalent for the 
Swedish term used), with much scientific data and explanation. 
As nearly as this can be explained to the lay mind it is a gigantic 
form of interstellar telepathy founded on scientific lines and made 
possible by the use of the ideagraph. 

Pangnos does not claim to talk the language of Alfomeg, but 
he says thoughts were before words; that he is enabled to read the 
thoughts of Alfomeg, and that as these thoughts come through the 
ideagraph, he has set them down in Swedish. He uses his own 
words with which to give form to the thoughts of Alfomeg. The 
first paper tells of the Novan creation as explained by Alfomeg. 
It is along lines of evolution, but departs somewhat from the ac- 
cepted views of evolutionists of this world. The account folhiws: 

Cbe jUccownt. 

In the beginning was Xova, and Xova was tlie universe, filling 
all space. 

And there were light and motion ; and the light was faint like 
a reflection from a cloud, and the great sphere of si^ace turned slow- 
ly on its axis. And this was the Cycle Aleph. 

And the sphere turned faster and the light grew stronsfer, and 
Xova no longer filled the sphere, but shrunk within itself and 
without was the great void, of space, and this was the Cycle Beth. 

Faster and faster turned tlie sphere, and a great ring was loos- 
ened from Nova, and it, too, turned faster and faster in space, 
and between the ring and Xova was a great void which always 



NOVA PERSEI. 3 3 

grew wider, and the ring was without and IS^ova was the center. 
And the ring was like a great band of pale flame, and it was 
named Onav. This was the Cycle Gimel. 

In tlie fourth cycle, which was Daleth, Xova shrank within it- 
self one-half, and a second ring of hright orange flame was 
formed, and between it and the first ring were millions of miles, 
and between it and Nova, which the second ring also encircled, 
were other millions of miles, and as it turned it broke in three, 
and each of the three parts gathered to itself about a center, and 
each became a sphere of blazing red, and each took its own orbit 
about N^ova. 

In the course of myriads of ages one part became the planet 
On, and a second became the planet Ov, and a third became the 
planet Va. 

And Xova shrank within itself yet once more by one-third its 
measure, and there was another ring, and this ring broke in four, 
and after other myriad ages there were the lesser planets A and 
V and and N, and each shone with a violet light. And this 
was the Cycle He, and there were the great sun Xova, with its 
furious light, and the lesser planets A and V and and X, and 
the greater planets Va"and Ov and On, and of these On was the 
greatest and X the least, and beyond was the great ring Onav, 
and beyond was great space, and beyond was nothing. 

And this ended the Cyclei He and the Cycle Vav began. 

In the Cycle Vav the planets, too, shrank within themselves, 
and from the greater of these came other rings, and these rings, 
in turn, broke and became moons, and each moon revolved about 
its own planet and followed the orbit of its planet about Xova. 
And dark patches appeared on the smaller planets, and their light 
was much obscured, but the great outer ring became less pale, 
and Xova shone with greater fury. At the uttermost bounds of 
space were now other and many faint lights, and these were the 
stars, and the universe was changed. 

This is the Cycle Zayin, which is yet. In this age life began — 
nay, not began, for always there was life; even to the first in the 



14 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

parent Nebula, from which our sun, Nova, was begotten, and in 
turn begot the planets as well the lesser as the greater, and the 
great ring Onav. For life and change are. Each atom is alive. 
It hath its likes and its dislikes, its love and its hatred, its mo- 
ment of strength whence quickly it passeth to old age in the 
twinkling of an eye. But the manifold life in which myriads of 
myriad atoms go to make the creature it did surely, begin in 
the Cycle Zayin, on the planet V. For little by little the great 
furnace of sp-ace had cooled. The fury of Nova grew less fierce, 
and on the planet V there came a time when there were heat and 
cold, and the clouds formed. Clouds of iron there were and of 
gold and of copper — and a chill came over space. 

The £eons passed and there were other clouds, and the Cycle 
Zayin had reached its noon, and in the thirteenth hour on the 
planet V there was a great change; oxygen and hydrogen had 
been wedded and steam hid the face of the new planet. And 
yet within the thirteenth hour the surface . in spots showed firm 
and the steam chilled on the hemisphere, which turned away from 
Nova, and the great void drew out the heat until the rain de- 
scended. The rain fell, but as it fell it turned to steam again. 
And when the thirteenth liour was on the wane there was land 
on V, and it was rock, and all above were weeping clouds and 
all within was seething flame. There were land and sea, and the 
clouds parted! and Nova was a great steel-white, glowing disc, and 
the planets shone, some with constant force and some only when 
Nova lighted up their faces. Then life was in new form, and 
there wore plants and animals, and there were plants before there 
were animals, and there were plants which began to be of higher 
form after the lesser things, which began to move of their own 
will, had already long been. 

Changes there were in land and sea, and in atmosphere, and V 
was like a great hot-house which forced strange living forms, and 
the species differed which had been one. Life took to itself new 
shapes and the thirteenth hour of the Cycle Zayin was well-nigh 
ilone. And when it was done, and the fourteenth was begun. 



NOVA PERSEI. 1 5 

there were creatures which thought aud some there were which 
tenanted the air and some the hand and others the sea. And be- 
tween those which dwelt upon the land and those which made 
midair their homes was strife^ and the war is yet,, for each in 
his own way doth think and plan strategem and cruelty. 

The creatures of the air are fierce, and they rush to war with 
great zeal. They fear not slaughter of their own kind, but go 
to the strife without heed of danger. Neither do they heed their 
wounded, nor do they heed their dead, for the dead, they are 
dead, and the wounded are but hindrance to the battle. We of 
the land are not so heartless, for the sufferings of our kind greatly 
move us. Pity and compassion we have. 

I, who am of the land, cannot endure those who are of the air, 
for each hath a different form of brain and peace between us 
there can never be. For the people of the air care for naught 
but cunning, and all things which they cannot use for selfish 
profit are meaningless to them, while to us the theory of thought 
is beautiful, and that we may think and reason in security we 
have made of caves our cities and our fortresses. 

Cbe Jlnalysis, 

Some strange discrepancies appear in the account of the Novan 
creation as outlined in words by Professor Pangnos, who claims 
to have received the ideas from Alfomeg, a dweller on the planet 
V, one of the lesser bodies of the Novan system in the constella- 
tion Perseus. Whether his account was bulled by cable or wire 
in the transmission from Upsala to San Francisco, or whether 
errors were made in the translation from Swedish into English 
I cannot say. ' 

If the higher criticism were applied to this narrative of an 
evolutionary creation of another universe, the story would be 
found faulty. It does not hang together. In fact, there seem 
to be two accounts which have been rather skillfully joined. Ap- 
parently the earlier portion of the narrative was the thought of 



16 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

one being (I caniiot sa}' man, for Pangnos has not given us any 
data as to what the embodied intellectuality on the planet V may 
be), while the latter part was the work of another brain, or con- 
sciousness. 

It is regrettable that more detail was not given by Professor 
Pangnos. Who Alfomeg may be he does not say. His article in 
the Svenska Stjerna leaves much to guess. His method of com- 
munication with another system of worlds is given but the barest 
mention. It seems to be a very high order of mind-reading, of 
telepathy, which knows neither bounds of distance nor of time, 
of thought rays riding a beam of light, much, as electricity uses 
a wire for its conductor. I am not sutBciently versed in astron- 
omy to say whether Pangnos is correct in his assumption that 
the light now reaching earth 'from Nova has been centuries on 
its way. Admittedly it is a journey of years, but whether it is 
one of three 3Tars or of three thousand years I am frank to say 
I do not know. 

As to the discrepancies in the account, Pangnos may hold for 
all I know that Alfomeg is not infallible, and that the story of 
thi3 Novan creation may be told as Alfomeg believes it to have 
been. That, of course, is a plausible, it may be a correct, theory. 

Of one thing there is a hint of difference between beings in 
the Planet V and on earth. It seems that there are two forms 
of life on Y which have about equal intelligence, if Alfomeg or 
Pangnos may be credited. It is much as if some bird, known to 
earth, the eagle, we will sa}^, was equal in intelligence to man, 
and as if there was a struggle for mastery between mankind and 
eagiekind. Alfomeg distinctly states that war has always been 
on the Planet V between dwellers on land and the tenants of mid- 
air. So evclutioil there must have produced not one type of life, 
as man on earth, but two, one apparently with the perceptive 
and physical over-development, and the other with greater re- 
flective and reasoning power, and each about equal in the strug- 
gle for existence. The fittest to survive were two, not one. 

As to the description, I take it, that Professor Pangnos does 



NOVA PERSEI. 17 

not pretend to give an exact account. He would not, for the rea- 
son, as he states, that ideas were before words. He merely pro- 
fesses to embod}^ the ideas of Alfomeg in his own Swedish lan- 
guage. Naturally, with so serious a subject, he drops into the 
archaic in the terms he uses. 

As to the C3^cles, whatever Alfomeg calls them, even if he has 
a spoken language, Pangnos wisely took the Hebrew letters in 
sequence as befitting terms, high-sounding, sonorous, and much 
more pretentious than the modern numerals. 

As to the life itself on V, one man's guess is as good as an- 
other's. It may be that Alfomeg represents the highest attain- 
ment to which the Articulata, as contrasted with the Vertebrata, 
may reach. His mentality may be greater than that of man. It 
may be that in some ways he excels man, in others falls below. 
It may be that the physical form of life on V is so different from 
all forms known to earth that we can have no knowledge of it. 
Possibly Alfomeg has consciousness of the outer world, not with 
such senses as we possess — of .sight, hearing, touch, taste, and 
smell — but by means of organs especially adapted to gain sensa- 
tion through the Eoentgen, ultra-violet and X-rays, and the many 
forms of energy which we know to exist, but which we cannot 
perceive until they have been translated into other terms of en- 
ergy with which our organs of sense can take cognizance. 

It is an interesting field for speculation. The regret is that 
Professor Pangnos has given so little. 




fallacy of Titimortallty. 



To the man who sees wdth the eye of faith a life beyond the 
grave argument has no appeal. To him whose beliefs have 
shrunken away, until what is left is but the withered kernel of 
a hope for the hereafter, there will come a time when he must 
stare truth in the face. The last years of the century just closed 
have shattered creeds and dogmas. Doubt is everywhere among 
thinkers. Kevelation has lost much of the authority It once had. 
The evangelical churches have been leavened with liberalism. Be- 
tween unitarianism. and agnosticism there is no quick line of 
cleavage. There is no data with which to prove what percentage 
has broken with orthodoxy. It is sufficient to know that it is a 
large one. The trend away from supernaturalism is unmistak- 
able, but even with the agnostic and liberal classes (perhaps 
masses might be a more accurate term), there is much to show 
that men still cling to a vague hope in immortality. It is the 
purpose of this article to show the fallacy of this hope. 

There has been something of a play in discussion upon the 
word "immortality,^^ but I mean to use it in its restricted sense 
of a conscious personality persisting after death. The immortal- 
ity through a long line of descendants may illustrate the parable 
of the seed, but it is not an immortality of self. The theory that 
matter is indestructible has been advanced to prove immortality. 
For all we know every atom which went to make a part of the 
White City of the World's Fair is still in existence. The city is 
not. Every molecule which ever formed a part of any being born 
into the world may still be, but it is not the immortality of a few 
moldering bones, a handful of dust, vapors cloud-scattered, for 
whicli man hopes. Every particle which entered into the make- 
up of some forgotten hero, who gave his life for his country at 
Thermopyle may have been present in some poltroon of a Greek, 



FALLACY OF IMMORTALITY. 19 

who fled like a cur before the Turk's advance on Larissa. That 
would be a regrettable sort of immortality, but it could hardly be 
regarded as a persistence of self after death. But all this is neg- 
ative. *; 

An immortality which does not consist of an existence of self, 
the persistence of the individual with all, or some, at least, of 
his mental characteristics, is not an immortality worth consider- 
ing. Outside of revealed religion there is little argument to sup- 
port a belief of an existence after death; and since revelation has 
come to be disregarded by so many, it may be permissible for 
those of us who have cast aside the traditions of orthodoxy to in- 
quire if there is a basis for any hope in a personal hereafter. 

If conscious self, the soul, if you so choose to call it, is to 
persist after death, if it is a something, an entity indestructible, 
is it not reasonable, then, to ask whether it has not had an in- 
finite existence in the past? If its future is unending, everlast- 
ing, ought it not always to have been ? If this soul has developed 
with the body, why should it not die with tlie body? If it 
had a beginning, when did it begin ? I do not suppose that think- 
ing people now believe that the child at the moment of birth be- 
comes possessed in some miraculous way of a soul. It is hardly 
reasonable to think that souls are hovering around in some hazy, 
nebulous condition, waiting the exact time of birth to take up a 
human abode. If this were so, w^hat would happen if there were 
not enough souls for the number of children born, or an overplus 
of souls? Ought we not to have in some instances children with 
two, three, or a dozen souls, and others with none ? Then, again ; 
where the child is born before the full time, how is the soul to 
know and be ready for its miraculous incarnation? On the other 
hand, the prenatal existence of the soul along with the embryo 
presents its difficulties. From the very first there is life, and 
if there cannot be life, that is, human life, without an accompany- 
ing soul, then in all prenatal stages the soul must be present; 
and, if then, why not before in the cells as they exist before the 
inception of the individual? Since spermist and ovulist hold ex- 



20 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

actly opposite views as to the cell which is developed into the in- 
dividual, so they must disagree as to the cell in which the soul is 
conceived. The parent cells have life and at their union develop 
along fairly well-ascertained lines. 

Does each have a half soul and the two unite to make one soal ? 
To those, who do not have faith in the supernatural it cannot 
appear reasonable that tlie soul attaches itself at any particular 
moment to the individual, or to that which may become the in- 
dividual, whether that moment be at birth, at some period of pre- 
natal life, or even before then to one of the cells, capable if all 
conditions prove favorable of final development into a human 
being. Since nature is lavish in providing for the sequence of life, 
■so that one individual results where the possibilities are multi- 
plied, shall we ascribe souls to the myriad of cells which fail of 
their purpose — a persistency of self to what might be called the 
waste products of nature? Can a soul be without a miracle? 
Would unconscious continuance of self be immortality? We 
know that we are. There is a place in the past back of which 
we do not know that we were. Beyond death we do not know 
that we shall be. Throwing aside the authority of revelation, all 
that we do know is that there is a persistence of self for a lim- 
ited time. Is consciousness so much of a marvel that it must 
he unending? Is there reason to believe that it exists as a force 
different from all other forces, inconvertible into any other 
form of energy and ungoverned hy any natural laws? Destroy 
the e3^e and sight ceases. Total deafness is not unknown. Cer- 
tain physical changes annihilate the senses of taste, toucli and 
smell. Lesions of the brain affect the mind. Personality itself 
suffers in mental infirmities, but the orthodox, and many who are 
not orthodox, would have us believe that the soul, or self, per- 
sists unchangeable, unaffected and immortal. If the eye by 
physical injury may become incapable of the function of sight 
and the brain by physical injury become incapable of the function 
of consciousness and other mental manifestations, why should 
we differentiate the two? Why should we not have an immor- 



FALLACY OF IMMORTALITY. 21 



tality of eyesight as well as an immortality of mind, soul, con- 
sciousness or self? Is mentality on any different plane than di- 
gestion? The stomach does not go on with an immortal perform- 
ance of its function after death. The brain ceases to act after 
life ceases. Is there anything more remarkable aibout the cessa- 
tion of the operations of the one than the other? Is there any 
reason in declaring that there is an undying entity connected with 
the result of the action of the nerve-cells and not with the mus- 
cular molecules? May not conscious energy be convertible into 
unconscious force, into heat, light, electric or other forms? An 
unconscious personality would be a poor substitute for immortal- 
ity. Unless conscious self persists without a break is not im- 
mortality a fallacy? 

Consciousness does not exist without interruptions. If it can 
cease for a little time, can it not cease for a longer time, or for- 
ever? In sound sleep does not consciousness cease, and the sub- 
conscious faculties keep up the work of maintenance of life? If 
it be held that it does not entirely cease, but merely approaches 
the point of cessation, would that alter the argument? If one 
should die in his sleep and the persistence of self after death 
should be that of sound sleep, would that be a conscious immor- 
tality worth having? If the slight physical changes incident to 
sleep so nearly annihilate the conscious self for a period of hours, 
is it unreasonable to ask if the absolute destruction of tissue, the 
■ greatest physical change possible, should not annihilate the soul 
beyond the grave? 

There is a stronger argument than the phenomena of sleep. 
Under the complete influence of an anaesthetic the mind is a 
blank; consciousness is obliterated.' If death comes during that 
condition, what is to awaken consciousness? If small physical 
changes can produce a temporary cessation of conscious self, will 
not the cessation continue under the greatest change ; or will we 
have an immortality under a condition of continued anaesthesia? 
Is that worth having. Is it immortality at all? Is it anything 
more than the existence of the dead trunk of a tree, a clod of 



22 



RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 



earth, a cloud of smoke — the immortality of iineonscioiisness, a 
continued state of death? 

The arg-ument is sometimes advanced that evolution promises 
immortality, that nature adapts herself to all conditions and de- 
velops to meet every emergency. Animals change their struc- 
tural forms to meet new environments, new wants; so to meet 
the need of continued personal existence nature may provide im- 
mortality. That presupposes that nature has need for individual 
immortality. Are not the facts these, that nature is prodigal 
in her preparations to provide for the continuance of the species 
and merciless as to the individual? Changed structural forms 
come after long struggle with new environments. The individ- 
ual perishes in the struggle, hut gives to posterity an imoulse, 
a potentiality that triumphs over seemingly adverse conditions. 

Is it not, after all, merely a selfish hope, this yearning after 
inunortality ? It is a hope common to men of all races and all 
conditions, but the fact that this is so does not prove that it is 
to be realized. The desire to avoid final personal annihilation 
might be put on the same plane as that to escape sorrow, sick- 
ness, pain. The hope for an everlasting existence may be like 
the hope for health, wealth, power, fame, not necessary of ful- 
fillment, and the instinctive argument therefore a baseless one. 

Unless we accept the miraculous and the supernatural as true, 
where is the evidence for immortality? 



story of a Reporter's Synaicate, 



Three chairs went slamming back from the pedro table in the 
San Francisco Press Club. This was a frequent expostulatory 
method in the old roomy quarters on Pine street, before the fire, 
which burned up Tombstone (the club's cat), as well as the due 
bills of the club's members. It was the old story of the "high 
man," the "low man," the "greedy man," and the other two. 
The high man had six to go; the greedy man had twelve; the 
low man was off the board with four cinches in a two-bit game, 
and the other two were trailing the greedy man. 

By all the ethics of draw pedro the greedy man should have 
given the low man the drop, but he had the king with two other 
trumps, and the low man had offered six and drawn four cards; 
so the greedy man, trusting the ace lay with the bidder, played 
a waiting game; and the high man caught the low man^s pedro 
with an ace and went out. That was why three chairs slammed 
angrily; why the low man said he'd be damned if he'd ever play 
another game of cards in which the greedy man had a hand ; 
why two others joined the profane protest, and why the high 
man mildly and hypocritically censured the greedy man for a 
false play, trying not to show (though everybody knew it), how 
glad he was that it had resulted to his profit just thirty steam 
beers, or several three-f or-two meals, while as 3^et it w^as a day and 
some hours toj pay-day. 

Incidentally Comstock, the greedy man, lost the presidency of 
the Press Club. At the election, two weeks later, he lacked a vote 
and that vote was cast for his rival by one of the men who was in 
the game. It is believed in the club to this day that all four voted 
against Comstock, including Sanchez, the high man. 

When Eeed, the low man, and the other two, Steele and Cole, 
had exhausted their words, and the secretly glad Sanchez had 



24 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

remarked, upon going to a window, that it was still raining in 
sheets, and that as the last car had left he would camp on Qie 
lounge for the night, Comstock, with the approaching election in 
view, did a diplomatic thing. He called the night steward to take 
the orders for five, and while Mose was mixing as many drinks 
they all fell to discussing their fellows of the newspaper world. 
There were city editors, who were beasts in the collective eyes of 
the five; notably, Bassett of the Monarch, who had come to the 
post two weeks before by reason of a shake-up, a periodic afflic- 
tion of that daily. Then there was Morrison, whose besetting sin 
was parsimony. Morrison kept a big extra staff to meet emergen- 
cies. Day after day he would walk into the local room, promptly 
at 1 o'clock, smiling and suave, to say: "Nothing this afternoon, 
gentlemen. If you will come around to-morrow I hope to have 
something for you.'' And the men cursed his manner more than 
his niggardliness. The copy-readers, too, who knifed space, un- 
derwent a verbal castigation, and that was how the talk reverted 
to Sparkle and his syndicate. 

Sanchez, who worked altogether on space, was bemoaning his 
week's bill, the smallest in months, he swore. The new copy- 
reader, on the Courant had knifed and chopped and chopped and 
knifed to make a record. All of his dovetailing of sentences to 
make his copy hard to cut had gone for nothing. 

"Start a new graft, Joe," said Steele, who was cynical and fat , 
as he gulped at a suisesse; "get some news for a change and quit 
padding." 

Sanchez was being frozen out on the Courant, as Steele knew. 
He was a swarthy little Creole, and his eyes flashed like a stiletto, 
as he started to niake a resentful reply, seeing which Cole broke 
in to say: 

"There's an economic freak on all the papers just at present. 
We might revamp Sparkle's Syndicate. Morrison's on the 
Courant now, and I think we could work him again with the old 
dodge if we dressed it up properly." 

Sanchez irritably consigned Sparkle's Syndicate to the nether 



STORY OF A Reporter's syndicate. 25 

world, and termed its author a skate. This was unjust criticism. 
Sparkle was not a skate, and his syndicate had lodged and fed for 
weeks four others and himself; but Sanchez's temper was roiled, 
and he was comparatively a new man, and had never met De- 
mosthenes Sparkle (Demos, as he was known to all of us old- 
timers), so all four began to enlighten him as to the merits of 
that syndicate, and the status of its inventor, which are parts of 
the annals of San Francisco newspaperdom. 

^'Sparkle wasn't a skate," protested Steele, "just a fair news- 
paperman like yourself, Joe. He wasn't a star," he added ironical- 
ly, "but with a fair show he could draw down $30 to $40 a week ; 
good all around man, do the water-front, police, federal, or any 
old routine, read copy or telegraph, but couldn't dress up a story 
like Herrick.'^ 

This was another drive at the Creole, who winced. Sanchez 
thought himself a star, though no one else did, and he suspected 
Herrick of trying to chisel him out of his place. 

"Sparkle was a fair all-around man, though," repeated Steele 
in his monotonous staccato. 

"Came in on the swine train, I've heard," volunteered Corn- 
stock. : 

"Then you heard wrong;" said Reed, with just a trace of a 
sneer; "the swine train doesn't go here, as anybody who hasn't 
been imported knows." 

This quieted Comstock, with the approaching election in view. 
He had come to San Francisco under a contract, which made the 
local men feel a little resentful toward him. Any man who chose 
to take his chance coming unannounced and unengaged into the 
San Francisco newspaper world was sure, if of the right sort, 
early or late, to receive the hand of fellowship. For the man en- 
gaged in the East and brought o-ut under salar}- a degree of cool- 
ness awaited. Few of these imported men had proved of value. 
They had, for the most part, drawn their salaries for the terms 
of their contracts, and had then dropped out of sight and mem- 
ory. Comstock was one who had stayed on and had gradually 
been adopted into the local circle. 



26 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHV. 

Reed lounged baek in the easy-chair as he l^egan the story. ^1 
met Sparkle the day he arrived/' he continued. "It was a raw 
July afternoon with the fog scurrying overhead when he strolled 
into the local room of the Monarch, and struck Morrison for a 
detail. He wore a straw hat, shoes that didn't match, trousers 
frayed at the edges, and a linen duster. There was a scraggy 
straw-colored beard of a week's growth on his face, and a general 
all-around hungry look about him. 

"In those days the Monarch would try out anyone who came 
along. Sparkle was the exception. Morrison told him that it 
was useless for him to come around, that he could give him no 
work, but that didn't feaze Demos. He showed up every day 
for a detail, borrowed two-bits whenever he could, haunted the 
^cocktail route,' and managed to pick up enough free lunches to 
keep body and soul together; but his clothes grew shabbier and 
shabbier, and it seemed a matter of hours only wdien they would 
refuse longer to hold to his frame. They were in the condition 
of the one-horse shay, just before it disintegrated. Things went 
on for a week or so. One Saturday afternoon Morrison walked 
into the local room and saw Demos sitting there, more ragged 
and more forlorn than ever, and said to him: ^Mr. Sparkle, I 
really cannot give you any work, and I must request you to keep 
away from the office.' 

"Demos braced the city editor for an explanation. He got a 
flat-footed one. Morrison told him he was so shabby he couldn't 
send him out on a detail; that his appearance would disgrace the 
Monarch. I was on office that day and Sparkle looked very down- 
hearted as he told me he had just been kicked out of the build- 
ing and touched me for a half a dollar. He was in no hurry to 
go, though; hung around for an hour or so and told me in part 
the story of his coming to San Francisco. Sparkle had beaten his 
way on the trains without much trouble from Denver to Ogden, 
but found the Central Pacific beyond his resources. He rode the 
brakebeam as far as Beowawe, Nevada, where he was kicked 
off the train by the conductor of the freight, ^sfevada was so 



STORY OF A reporter's SYNDICATE. 27 

infested with tramps at that time that whenever he approached 
a house the dogs were sicked on him before he could open his 
mouth, or' offer to work for a meaL Well, he tramped it to Bat- 
tle Mountain, and, after being half-starved for a week, fell in with 
a cattle train, and was given his meals and a ride to Oakland, in 
consideration of caring for the cattle en route. Demos told me 
that he had seriously thought of drowning himself in the Hum- 
boldt river, before he got the job with the cattlemen, but the 
river was shallow, and every time he found a pool deep, enough, 
something about it deterred him, and he would walk along in 
search of a better place in which to take the final plunge. 

"Sparkle reached the Oakland mole without a nickel and the 
cattlemen would not give him the 15 cents then necessary to pay 
his fare across the ferry. He had had some trouble with them 
the last day out, he told me, because he had forgotten to do the 
work for which he had been hired. How he managed to cross 
the bay he would not tell, and looked very shame-faced when I 
asked him — the only time I ever saw him exhibit the failing of 
modesty. My opinion is that he was ashamed to admit that he 
was not resourceful enough to get across and had tramped it a 
hundred miles around the bay by way of San Jose. 

"'Sparkle left the office for the last time, as I supposed. Mon- 
day morning the Monarch sprang a full first page sensation un- 
der the scare-head Tiety in Eags.' It was the tale of a tramp 
who had visited the leading churches of the city, with the re- 
ception he had received recorded in cold type. It was related 
with an air of truth and frankness that was convincing. Surly 
ushers, frowning preachers, the marble heart in the house of God, 
all were set down. At one of the swell churches he had been 
shown the door; at one or two minor places of worship he had 
been cordially received. There was a three-day sensation. Cler- 
gymen of churches which had not been visited wrote to say that 
the poor were always welcome in their congregations. Pastors 
of churches which had given the visitor a cool reception declared 
they would have the ushers discharged. There was much apol- 



28 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

ogy and an amusing haste to shift blame from shoulders to other 
shoulders. Sparkle had caught on. The story at space rates 
was worth nearly $40, and the news editor persuaded the boss to 
make it an even fifty. Wednesday was pay-day on the Monarch, 
then, as now, and no one in the local room saw him until then. 
I heard afterwards that he stayed in his room till Wednesday 
morning to hide his rags; reached the office that day before the 
cashier, and was the first to draw his pay. At 1 o'clock he saun- 
tered into the local room, dressed in the best ready-made materials 
to be had from hat to patent leathers, and Morrison placed him 
regularly on the staff.^^ 

A boxing contest between Comstock and Tombstone inter- 
rupted Eeed's narrative. The cat thoroughly detested Comstock, 
but in a moment of forgetfulness had incautiously approached 
within reaching distance, and the candidate for the club presi- 
dency had quickly wrapped him in a bear skin rug. Tombstone 
had some strange aversion for this bear skin (an atavistic fear 
most of the club members held), and resented the attack with 
his claws, drawing blood; whereat Comstock sought to cuff him, 
and the cat struck out like a prizefighter, retiring from the en- 
counter with honors and an arched back. 

Towards the end of the bout between the cat and Comstock, 
Steele had prodded Sanchez in the ribs as he lay at full length 
on the lounge, primarily to stop his snoring, and also to tell him 
to come to his brother's rescue. (Tombstone was black as Satan 
and the Creole was so swarthy that they were known to the club 
as the twins.) 

"When was it that Sparkle ran his syndicate?'' Cole asked, as 
Mose again responded to Comstock's diplomatic call, a bit of 
strategy which the election failed to reward. 

"That was in '91," replied Steele, who, addressing himself to 
Sanchez, and pointing his moral by innuendo, proceeded briefly 
to sketch Sparkle's meteoric career. Prosperity had proved the 
undoing of Demos on the Monarch, Fakes, inspired of much 
drink, had exhausted Morrison's patience, till he had told Sparkle 



STORY OF A reporter's SYNDICATE. 29 

to go. Demos had lasted six weeks on the Courant, the recollec- 
tion of which was still a nightmare to that paper. Sparkle had 
managed to perpetrate a series of animal stories on the Courant. 
Seals had come to the rescue of drowning sailors off the Cliff 
House; cats had routed burglars in the Western Addition; elk 
and bison had fought in Golden Gate Park, and a rattlesnake 
loose in a Valencia street car had stampeded passengers, grip- 
man and conductor. From the Courant Sparkle had gone to the 
Keveille. His first detail had been to report the banquet to Pres- 
ident Harrison at the Palace Hotel, and he had forgotten to re- 
turn to the office. That had ended his usefulness on the Reveille, 
and the day he applied to the Alta, that journal, which had been 
on the ragged edge for months, suspended. 

"Sparkle saw the seamy side of life for some weeks. Past cred- 
it at various bars gave him free lunch privileges for a time. He 
haunted the Receiving Hospital where the medical students ex- 
periment on the unfortunate and divided their sandwiches with 
them. He kicked out the partition between the Courant and 
Monarch desks in the reporter's room at the Old City Hall, and 
camped there of nights. When October came news livened up, 
politics hummed, the miners' convention was in session, there 
were tw^o or three other State affairs in progress, and reporters 
were in demand. Sparkle picked up four men out of work and 
one by one sent them, properly coached, to Momson, who put 
them to work on the Monarch.'' 

•'It was a good scheme," said Reed. "The men were hobos, 
they weren't even skates, but MoiTison fell into the trap. One 
was a Norwegian sailor, one a letter carrier, the third a waiter 
from a cheap restaurant, and the fourth a Geary street conductor, 
who had been discharged for using a 'brother-in-law.' " 

"What's a brother-in-law ?" innocently asked Comstock. 

"Well, I'll be hanged ; did you ever hear such ignorance ?" said 
Steele. "A brother-in-law is a thing to help a conductor knock 
down. It's a false bell he rings so as not to register fares." 

"When the scheme was in working order," continued Reed, 



30 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

"Sparkle gave a reception to twoi or three of us in his room. He 
had a little back room in a Kearny-street lodging house. It was 
a cold night. The syndicate had not been in working order 
long enough to supply Demos with funds. '^We're poor, but we're 
hospitable/ he said. ^If you boys'll excuse me a couple of minutes 
I know a coal dealer who has a little shop back of the Palace 
Hotel who'll sell a fellow 10 cents worth of coal.' This was about 
3 o'clock in the moTuing. In five minutes Sparkle came back 
looking like a Supervisor. He unbuttoned his coat and out 
dropped eight or ten chunks of coal, which were soon blazing their 
liveliest in the little grate. You know he roomed about two 
blo'cks from the Courant office. I've heard since that coal disap- 
peared with astonishing rapidity in the Courant local room that 
season. 

"All four of Sparkle's proteges were kept busily at work. Half 
the rievvspaper men in town knew of the scheme, but 'Oemos was a 
good fellow and no one gave the snap away, so Morrison didn't 
catch on. The men got two details a day ; that was $3 apiece and 
a Sunday story and a little space was run in, so together they 
drew down about $90 a week. Demos took half for his share. 

"The four used to come down regularly to the police reporters' 
rooms.' One of the hobos could write a fair hand and Sparkle 
dictated to him. The others told what they had been detailed to 
do, and Demos wrote up their copy. Then all four would start 
for the Monarch, going into the office about five minutes apart to 
turn in their stuff. 

"Things went along swimmingly for a month, and then Demos 
had to go on a booze. His proteges could not find him to get their 
stuff fixed and so they braced the city editor themselves. The 
waiter handed in his copy with little i's and badly misspelled, and 
Morrison told him he was drunk and discharged him. The sailor 
had been sent out on labor, and reported that he could not find 
Macdonald. This aroused Morrison's suspicions, for Macdonald 
did the labor detail on the Reveille, and it was to him Sparkle 
had been in the habit of sending the sailor for tips. On top of 



STORY OF A REPORTER S SYNDICATE. 



31 



this the letter carrier and the conductor reported that they had 
fallen down on their assignments. Morrison, who could not tell 
a drunken man unless his breath, was strong enough to knock one 
down, suspected booze, but a new copy reader, who was on that 
night, told him the hobos were sober, so he began an inquisition 
which led to a confession by the sailor of the whole job. The four 
hobos were discharged, including the waiter. Morrison was so 
mad that he discharged himi over again. 

"By force of habit Sparkle came reeling into the police report- 
ers' room dow^n at the old City Hall about 2\ o'clock that morning 
and stretched out on the desk. He was too far gone to understand, 
so we posted up notices all around him, sacred to the memory of 
the syndicate and locked him' in for the night. 

"Two days after that Sparkle disappeared. 

"Poor old Demos I I haven't seen him since. He dropped 
completely out of sight. I suppose he's come to some tragic end 
before this," moralized Steele. 

"Guess again," said Comstock. "It's comedy instead of trag- 
edy; he's married." All of our faces expressed interrogation 
marks, and Comstock added: "Yes, he's married to the daughter 
of a Los Angeles banker. I was introduced to him in San Ber- 
nardino last month (you know I took a two weeks' vacation in 
Southern California.) Sparkle is quite a power the other side of 
Tehachapi ; he's running a Prohibition paper for the pne-lungers 
in Pasadena." 

"The hell you say !" said Steele. 

Then five voices in chorus shouted "Mose !" The steward came 
from the bar to take the orders. In an adjoining room the Press 
Club quartet was practicing "Eocked in the Cradle of the Deep." 
Outside the rain beat a threnody on the window panes. 



Cak$ from Catnpa. 



Cbe Scoop Cbat Tailcl 

On the bulletin board of the Tampa Bay Hotel there appeared 
one noon quite a full account of the expedition of the Gussie to 
the coast of Cuba, the landing of men from the First Infantry, 
the encounter with a Spanish patrol, the wounding of one of the 
American invaders, and the capture of one of the enemy, the re- 
treat to the steamer and its return to an American port. 

This account was signed by a correspondent ofl a Western papei 
with the accompanying statement that the journal which he rep- 
resented had issued an extra giving in detail the foregoing facts. 

The bulletin board had been used by the newspapermen to an- 
nounce the most important war news which their respective papers 
had to give and by the army to post orders of general interest. 

New York newspapermen strolled back from luncheon too in- 
different to notice the bulletin board. Chicago newspapermen, 
more curious, glanced at the board and laughed. The idea that 
Chicago could be scooped was preposterous. So they laughed and 
made comments and Jeered about news coming from California by 
slow freight, while the New York contingent maintained its in- 
difference until it was suggested that General Shafter be seen re- 
garding the story. 

General Shafter confirmed it. The facts were true. It was the 
first time that an American force had landed in Cuba. The men 
were from his old command, the First Infantry, stationed for 
years at San Francisco. They had been given the honor of mak- 
ing the first reconnoiter. The first American blood had been shed 
on Cuban soil. Then the New York men and the Chicago men 
berated Shafter and made the wires hot with specials to the 



TALES FROM TAMPA. 



33 




LOITERING ON THE PIER AT PORT TAMPA. 



papers published in those cities^ which speedily had extras on the 
streets announcing the facts. 

It was 4 o'clock in the afternoon when the correspondent who had 
scooped the w^orld received a telegram from his paper. Just what 
form the congratulations would assume he was curious to know, 
so he hastily tore open the envelope and read a rebuke from his 
managing editor for wasting day tolls on an unimportant mes- 
sage. He was informed that the paper which he represented was 
not issuing extras over trivial events; that it had not issued an 
extra on the news sent, and to confine his telegrams to mes- 
sages sent at night rates hereafter unless he really had some im- 
portant news. 

And the New York men and the Chicago men and the corrs- 
spondents from Toronto and Des Moines, from Minneapolis and 
St. Louis frankly complimented him, and the San Francisco man 
kept his own counsel and his managing editor's telegram. 



si RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY, 



0'$b4Udbnc$$y and tbe Queen. 

Primaril}^ he was James O'Shaiighnessy, Jr., incidentanv war 
correspondent at Tampa oi the Chicago Chronicle, and he looked 
his name. ( 

With his name and personality went that hatred of the English 
and things English wdiich he thought was rightfully his as a blood 
inheritance. Now, whether it was so or whether this hatred was 
the outgrowth of much study and agitation doesn't really matter. 
I incline to the latter belief as one who thinks that the doctrine of 
heredity is being overworked just now, but O'Shaughnessy insists 
that I am wrong and that he is the best judge ^f his own mental 
processes. 

Among the hundred or more war correspondents at Tampa were 
representatives of English and Canadian papers, men from the 
London Times, the London Chronicle', the London Mail, the Lon- 
don Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian and other journals of 
note. There were British attaches, naval and military, as well as 
those of other nationalities, ready to accompany the army of inva- 
sion. There is a good-sized English colony in Florida, and the 
principal paper of the State, the Jacksonville Times-Union and 
Citizen, was Anglican in its editorial sympathies. 

This was at a time when the press of continental Europe, with 
two exceptions, one a journal of Rome and the other published at 
Budapest, was reeking with vituperation of America and prophe- 
sying the success of the Spanish arms. It was also a time when 
the English press got on the right side so far as feeling and proph- 
ecy went, when the sentiment that l)lood was thicker thp.ri water 
was given open expression, when the Union Jack and the Stars 
and Stripes were crossed and when the talk of a t'in.<rible though 
not official Anglo-American alliance found vogue. 

The Queen's birthday fell while the troops were at Tampa. So 
the shipping and the transports in the harbor were dressed for the 
occasion, and the flags of the United Kingdom and the United 



TALES FROM TAMPA. 



35 



States draped the walls of the dining-room at the Tampa Bay 
Hotel. The dinner that day took the form of a hanqnet in honor 
of the Queen. 

The night before as a guest of the hotel 0'Shaughnes.sy pro- 
tested. He would not drink a health to the sovereign of the 
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He would not 
dine in a Ijuilding while a banquet was being given in honor of the 




LOOKING TOWARD PORT TAMPA. 



Queen, he swore, and by his silent presence seemingly acquiesce; 
and he kept his oath. He would not enter the dining-room while 
the English flag was there, he declared, and he didn't. 

With the exception of 0\Shaughnessy and a friend of his, we all 
partook of the usual noonday dinner, even the correspondents of 
the German papers. It was the usual dinner, though it was called 
a banquet, but there were speeches and responses. The American 
generals and those of the army of lesser rank, and the foreign at- 



36 



RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 



taches, all in their newest uniforms, were there. Prominent civil- 
ians were present, and the affair passed pleasantly with the health 
of the President and the Queen, and the usual interchange of 
courtesies. 

It was after the decorations had been removed from the dining- 
room that we next saw O'Shaughnessy. He had persuaded Julian 
Harris, city editor of the Atlanta Constitution, to be his guest that 
day. Whether they dined at the inn on the pier, messed with the 
Cubans at West Tampa, or visited some restaurant in Ybor City 
or Fort Brooke, I do not know. Both gave assurance that they 
had had a better dinner than they could have obtained at the 
Tampa Bay Hotel, and that I believed and still do, but I have 
never learned how that dinner was itemized in O'Shaughnessy's 
expense account. 




WHERE TBEY GATHERED FOR SMALL TALK. 



TALES FROM TAMPA. 37 

gensor and Correspondent 

Captain Bi'ady, local censor, refims to Mow the correspondents 
of the leading American papers maintained here at heavy expense 
to send ont the news, which, according to tlie Jacl'SonviUe Times, ap- 
peal's in the London Chronilcle with your approval. The same class 
of news ij puMislied in the little dailies hsre with impunity. In 
otiher words, news ivhich originates in Tampa is given publicity to 
the tuorld, iut the correspotidents sent here liy the press of tifie prin- 
cipal cities can ivire nothing out. The news of Shafters expedition 
goes all over the world, but we, who loere sent here to write it, are re- 
fused the wires. 

The foregoing telegram with "ofs" and "thes" omitted was sent 
from Tampa to General Greely, who, as head of the Signal Ser- 
vice at Washington was placed in charge of the press censorship. 
It was signed by the correspondents at Tampa of the leading 
American papers as a final protest against a foolish censorship, 
which was accomplishing nothing. Captain Brady was sustained 
by General Greely and the incident was officially closed. There- 
after the correspondents devoted themselves to outwitting Captain 
Brady with some measure of success. ' 

Newspapermen are not less patriotic than men of other callings. 
They average with the rest and would have yielded to any im- 
partial censorship. 

The correspondents who had accompanied General Shaffer's 
headquarters from New Orleans, or had caught the train at Jack- 
sonville, were invited to an informal conference b^ Colonel Bab- 
cock aboard the train on the night preceding its arrival at Tampa. 

Colonel Babcock suggested that the newspapermen agree then 
and there to send nothing to their papers which could be of use to 
the enemy in the war which had just been declared by Spain. 
The newspapermen replied that there was no wish on their part 
to publish anything which could be of the least service to the 
Spanish or which would be in any way detrimental to the success 



38 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

of the American arms; but as non-military men, they would not 
be the best judges of what might be deemed injurious from the 
point of view of the army. They knew news. They did not pro- 
fess to know strategy and tactics. 

To Colonel Babcock's request for their pledge of honor they re- 
plied suggesting an impartial censorship. They had the censorship, 
some twelve days later. Impartial at first it afterward degen- 
erated into a most arbitrary, and from the point of view of the 
writers, a most ineffectual and foolish, though annoying one. 

For a few days correspondents wired what they chose, or a& 
much of it as the limited telegraphic facilities at Tampa would 
permit. Then one day they found the wires closed to them. The 
censorship had been established, with Lieutenant Miley in charge 
and the State of Florida as his jurisdiction. Xot a press message 
would bej accepted unless it bore "0. K., Miley." The censorship 
was rigid, but absolutely fair. Lieutenant Miley was courteous, 
obliging as to hours, did everything to accommodate the news- 
papermen except to permit the sending of news, which, in his 
judgment, might be of use to the enemy, and his judgment, as a 
military man, practically excluded all war news. There were no 
protests. There was no adverse criticism of the censor. Three 
correspondents, who sought to evade the censorship by sending 
through the mails what was not permitted to go by wire, had their 
permits, issued by the War Department to accompany the Ameri- 
can Army to Cuba, revoked. The papers which offended were in- 
formed that they would be allowed no representatives with the 
invading force. 

Lieutenant Miley, afterwards promoted to a colonelcy, died 
while in service in the Philippines. In addition to his work as 
press censor at Tampa, Lieutenant Miley had multiform duties to 
perform as aide to General Shaffer. As things began to shape 
themselves for the invasion, and the chaos at Tampa became 
worse, he was selected to bring something like order out of the 
confusion. 

One afternoon a young man, reddish of beard, wearing white 



TALES FROM TAMPA. 39 

leather shoes, having a reticule dangling at his waist, clad in the 
uniform of a lieutenant, entered the room where the correspond- 
ents were at work, and with a trace of pompousness that the news- 
papermen instinctively resented, informed them that he was Cap- 
tain Brady, the new censor. He demanded their credentials, that 
he might write his name across them. Some complied. Some 




TRANSPORTS DRESSED FOR THE DAY 




refused and were sustained hy higher authority, since the wording 
of these credentials required that they should be vised by the gen- 
eral in command. 

Captain Brady was not a bad sort of a fellow, but he was young, 
possessed of the freshness of the Middle West, with more than 
his average of self-conceit, and he began wrong. First, he en- 
deavored to lecture the correspondents, and then he talked of 
himself, and he talked too much. He was a newspaperman, he 
said, and he knew just how to deal with newspapermen. He had 



40 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

once acliieved a great scoop, and he related how he got it. IMost of 
us who heard the recital would rather have done without that scoop 
than to have obtained it in the way Brady said he had secured it. 

A newspaperman is a newspaperman all over the United States 
and he knows his fellows. We knew that Brady was not. He had 
written a little for some papers, hut he betrayed himself. His 
assumed familiarity was misplaced. First, he fixed an hour at 
which all copy should be submitted, an impossible hour for prac- 
tical newspapermen. Then he failed to keep his own hour. 
Finally he refused the wires altogether, except to permit the cor- 
respondents to send out "No news to-night,'' and then he relaxed 
the rigidity of the order. He undertook to prohibit the little 
dailies in Tampa from' publishng the news, but found that he had 
gone without his province and the dailies defied him and went on 
publishing. The news in these papers, as soon as they reached 
points outside of Florida, like Atlanta and Savanah, was wired 
broadcast. Then the newspaper correspondents sent their futile 
protest to Greely and then they fought the censor with their own 
weapons. Letters were sent to towns beyond his jurisdiction and 
placed on the wires. One correspondent who had forwarded many 
photographic films sent an apparently long and meaningless mes- 
sage to his paper, explaining that he thought one film in four 
would develop. A lucky guess at the home office prompted the 
copy reader to search for the cipher. He read every fourth word 
and his, paper flashed real news from Tampa. This was repeated 
for several days until the censor became suspicious, when this form 
of communication was prudently abandoned. 

But the censor fought back through the head office at Wash- 
ington. False news was given out at the national capital, which 
was sent broadcast over the country. Most of the newspapers 
published it in spite of warnings from their Tampa correspond- 
ents not to do so. 

A week or ten days before the transports sailed with the army 
of invasion for Cuba it was announced from Washington that the 
expedition had started. Even so careful a paper as the New York 



TALES FROM TAMPA. 



41 



Sun was tricked into publishing this statement at length, while 
the New York Journal out-3^ellowed itself with a full first-page 
picture ot the departure of the transports. 

But the worst of Brady's censorship was his ignorance of what 
good faith should be. He commented upon the copy submitted, 
discussed where other newspapermen could hear what their rivals 
had written, and even went so far as to read aloud to a little co- 
terie which he had gathered about him some of the press dis- 
patches which had been filed. 

If the United States is to "engage in future wars it would be a 
wise thing for the G overnment to study the censorship problem. 




A CHARACTERISTIC LANDSCAPE IN JLORIDA. 



Electric €avcrn of £a$ Savinales. 



A gnlch washed out between steep lime hills, a waterless stream 
winding its gravelly way with sharp turns against jutting bluffs 
or dividing before some giant boulder, the hills crowned with 
maguey and ocatilla and scraggy flakes of blue lime, southward a 
wall of serrated granite peaks, whence in time past the skeleton 
of a stream, which was now dry, had received the wash, of tropic 
rains and had roared do^vn its steep course, a living, savage tor- 
rent — these were the natural features. A group of tents, irregu- 
larly pitched to suit convenience, and set down upon the compro- 
mise between steep and flat, which lay at the foot of one of the 
lesser hills sloping into the ravine, formed our settlement. An 
American prospecting camp (it hardly rose to the dignity of a 
mining camp, boastingj but one claim, and that La Plancha de la 
rlata, just back off our village of tents, from which ore was being 
shipped), it was situated in that picturesque, sUn-burned desert 
region of Xorthern Chihuahua, known as Las Savinales, equidis- 
tant from comparative civilization, some one hundred and forty 
miles to El Paso and Deming. 

Some thirty and odd Americans, we had prospected the country 
about, each having with him the miners trinity — rifle, canteen 
and pick. Water there was none save what was carried. Apaches, 
under that old renegade, Geronimo, were out on raid, and the un- 
armed prospector was worse than defenseless. So, to the fatigue 
of prospecting was added the spice of danger, which, perhaps, put 
a little spirit into weary limbs, and, had occasion offered, doubt- 
less would have added haste as well. 

After more or less ill-success, the searchers for silver had grad- 
ually discovered, most of them, what were sure to be paying 
claims, and blasting and drilling took the place of prospecting, 
and the hills about became the busv scene of noise and labor. 



ELECTRIC CAVERN OF LAS SAVINALES. 43 

One day I started for San Jose by buckboard with eighty pounds 
of ore for a mill run; made that station on the Mexican Central 
about midnight of the day following and El Paso the next noon. 
The mill run showed twenty ounces of silver to the ton. Silver 
was then worth a dollar an ounce (this was in 1885), but the cost 
of production, owing to the situation of my claim, would Qot be 
less than $75 a ton, so I never went back to Las Savinales. 

I happened to be in El Paso in 1898, and chanced to meet one 
of my old prospecting friends, now holding a Government posi- 
tion ther3. This is the story he told, first requesting that his 
name be withheld, and then reduced it to writing: 

"I had been less successful than others. I had w^andered about 
prospecting with a thoroughness worthy of a better result and had 
been unsuccessful in finding even the trace of a metal-bearing 
ledge. Just about dusk one evening, as, weary with the day's vain 
quest, I sat upon a round lime boulder, musing like Mirza upon 
the vanity of human affairs, my eye chanced to glance at a peculiar 
outcropping about two rods distant. 

"A peculiar impulse, one of those unaccountable freaks that 
sometimes takes possession of a man's mind, prompted me to in- 
vestigate. A ringing blow with my pick and a hollow, echoing 
sound caused further exploration, and I soon forced an opening 
into a cavern. 

"The rock broken from a vein within the opening glistened with 
ruby silver in tiny specks, the rosa clara of the Mexicans, and a 
dark vein of plata negra seamed the punctured edge. Here were 
discovery and hope ; but as it was then dark I hastened to return 
to my camp, first carefully concealing my work that others should 
not profit instead of myself. 

"Some mischance delayed me the next morning. It was past 1 
o'clock when I at last made ready to start, and as the distance was 
considerable I decided to go fully prepared with provisions and 
candles to make a full exploration and to remain if necessary for 
the night. 

"Reaching the spot, a few strokes served to clear aw^ay a good- 



44 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

sized opening, and, removing the debris, I entered or rather 
dropped, for below me about eight feet, as I judged, was a shining, 
glistening floor or shelf of rock. 

"Once in, curiosity tempted me for the time being to forget my 
search for silver-bearing leads and to make a thorough investiga- 
tion of the cavern. 

"The cave was in lime formation, and a practical knowledge of 
geology, though I doubt then if I had ever read a word upon the 
subject, led me to believe that it might be extensive. So I wan- 
dered on for perhaps two hours through long tunnels, vaulted 
chambers, lighting my way with my miner's candle. 

"Suddenly, when, as I supposed, approaching the end of a huge 
arched natural passageway, I came upon an opening to the right 
from which a pale light issued. 

"I turned and entered, and as I did so carelessly stumbled against 
a box of some kind. I knew it was a box by a something of a yield 
to the pressure, which rock never gives to the touch. 

"Collecting myself, relighting my candle, which had been ex- 
tinguished by the fall, I "proceeded to an examination. 

"As I did so, I was startled by a groan. I was sure I heard 
the groan, and so certain w^as I that I fancied that I could detect 
the mingled tone of anger and despair. 

"I jumped to my feet and stood listening. Xothing disturbed 
the silence. I lingered, waiting for a moment or two, and then, 
mentally cursing my folly, stooped down and with a sudden 
wrench tore fastenings and lid at once from the box. 

"As I did so, I beheld at a glance curiously formed ornaments, 
both of gold and silver (as it seems to me now, beaten out by hand 
and queerly interwoven in a delicate, lace-like work), a sort of 
prepared parchment from cotton, if such a term may be used in 
describing the scroll, upon which strange hieroglyphics werf^ 
painted in bright colors, and in one corner of the box a heap of 
ashes from which, several human bones protruded. 

"At the same moment that I had wrenched the lid from the 
box and beheld at one glance, as it were, the contents, a strange. 



ELECTRIC CAVERN OF LAS SAVINALES. 45 

hissing, crackling sound, to which for comparison nothing more 
nearly approaches it in tone than the high sizzle of an electric car, 
greeted my ear, together with the same long-draw-out groan of 
wrath and despair. 

"Then the faint light which illuminated the place and which I 
had forgotten for the time began to grow brighter. It was 
not like a phosphorescent light, but seemed to be something in the 
nature of the incandescent electric flame. 

"I looked about me, and in the full glare which now obtained 
beheld, arched above, a square-willed room, abounding in niches, 
in which grinned a great number of human skulls from and about 
which played great masses of soft flames and little shooting rays 
of light. 

"My hair stood on end; my brain seemed afire and my whole 
frame was bathed in a cold perspiration. I am not superstitious, 
but for a moment I stood spellbound, and then with a wild, ma- 
niac-like cry, I fled. 

"However I managed to get out my memory fails me. I must 
have wandered about in dark passages of the cavern for hours, 
for I had dropped candle and everything in my flight. 

"At length a glimmer of the outer light reached me, and, mak- 
ing my way thither, I soon found myself in the open morning air. 

"I had escaped by a different outlet than the opening through 
which I had entered the cavern, and shortly reached what had been 
the camp. 

"Had I passed through a Eip Van Winkle episode ? Camp and 
tents had disappeared, save for the fragments which littered the 
ground. 

"A short inspection convinced me that I had not slimibered for 
twenty years, but that a visit of Apaches had caused the sudden 
and fearful change. 

"Secreting myself for the da}^, at night I started for the Mex- 
ican Central Railway, and with nothing beyond a tiresome jaunt 
for three nights I reached a little station, and was thence quickly 
transported to El Paso. 



46 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

"Here I found my companions, who had escaped the Apaches, 
luckily seeing them in time and leaving an unoccupied camp to 
their tender mercies. As I had failed to return at the usual time, 
they had thought me captured or hutchered. 

"I related my stmnge adventure and endeavored to recruit a 
party and return and make a thorough investigation, but either 
doubting my tale or fearing to go back to an Apache-infested re- 
gion, my eompanions, one and all, refused. 

"I never returned to the camp, and to this day am at loss to 
fathom the strange things I saw and heard in the cavern of Las 
Savinales. 

"Devoting since then something of a study to the correlation of 
forces, the change from mechanical motion to molecular or atomic, 
the conversion of heat and light into electricity and the general 
interchange of all the forces of nature, as a layman in philosophy, 
J. hazard a solution, which may or may not be based upon scien- 
tific principles. I am tempted to believe that the vital force may, 
by some means unknown to us, but with which the ancient Aztecs 
were familiar, be converted into other forms of energy and that 
when death seemed about to ensue to any of the more favored mor- 
tals of Aztlan, the high priests, by their arts, changed thought and 
the life current into tlie electrical force, which, lingering about the 
form of the once man, produced the peculiar manifestation I be- 
held. 

"Perhaps the ulterior purpose may have been, when ages should 
have rolled around and the proper conditions should have been 
attained, to restore to consciousness and living life by the recon- 
version of the electric force to human will and thought." 



Dk in wbicb tbe moral i$ made to Precede 

tbe Story. 



A strange story was related some years ago to which I attach 
little credence, but the story,, such as it is and as I remember it, 
is given fully. It seems queer that scientists should be so easily 
misled, and yet are they not? Isn't there, after all, a good deal 
of pretense, or guesswork, not to call it by the harsher term of 
charlatanism or quackery on the part of science or its exponents? 
There is a sort of claim to infallibility by the modern philosophers, 
which is not just what modesty should demand. The age of em- 
piricism has not ended yet, and to the man who looks at the pros- 
pect fairly, little indications of its coming to an end appear. 

If scientists could have been deceived with the workings of a 
finite cosmos in miniature, can they not be deceived in other ways? 
May not Professor Jacques Loebs of Chicago, with his death agent 
and his life agent contending for mastery, be the agent of his own 
delusion? Mahomet and some other founders of world religions 
are supposed to have been the victims of their own imaginations 
and ta have fondly thought that what they gave was truth ab- 
solute and eternal. May not the apostles of science be equally 
deceived in themselves and their deductions? This may be an 
unusual way of prefacing a story with the moral, but perhaps 
there may be more of a tale in the moral than in the story itself. 

The moral might be extended with a local application. Is it 
an unfair question to ask if the plague-finders of this Coast, who 
busied themselves some time ago with a great scare, might have 
erred like the scientist who hoped to start the process of creation 
anew, and with this hope strong, actually announced that he had 
done so? Is it altogether unfair to answer the question, and 
strongly in the affirmative, in the face of the fact of one known 
and acknowledged grievous blunder? Perhaps one other question 



48 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

would not be too much of a digression, and that is this: How 
many bacteriologists of this city would undergo a test with slides 
of various bacilli and agree to guess each one correctly ? 

The story to which the moral has been prefixed follows: 

I had always been fond of experimental study, but after my 
own manner — not content with the usual plodding efforts of the 
student, but striking out into the domains of science and delving 
after the secrets of nature in my own way. 

Mental phenomena and the relations between mind and matter 
attracted a large part of my attention, and in the enthusiasm of 
3^outh I became a sort of pantheist, not exactly worshipping na- 
ture, of a buoyant disposition with a fair share of conceit, rather 
.above worshiping anything, I thought, not willing to' brook a 
superior even though that superior be superhuman, yet nature was 
my god as much as anything I had. 

With such views, reasoning upon the infinitude of space and 
motion, by analogy I deduced my own laws of cause and effect, 
planned the creation as it should have been, and made, like many 
.another modern philosopher, force and matter, the all in all of 
(existence. 

This being true and my premises, as I thought, too well 
grounded to admit dispute, I deduced life as the vital foree and 
its mental correlatives as but the expression in new terms (I had 
grown to think in a mathematical way, though often with a rather 
vague understanding, which hardly seemed in accord with the 
science of exactness) of matter in motion. Life and thought, 
thought I, are existent in and throughout nature, an inseparable 
part of the whole, though latent, except as manifested in the vege- 
table and animal kingdoms, and need but the proper conditions to 
be brought forth from what we have been pleased to term inert, 
inorganic matter. 

To produce light a certain rapidity of atomic or molecular 
motion only is needed; to produce sound vibration within certain 
limits of time ; to produce electricity the conversion of mechanical 
motion by proper appliance suffices; to produce life, what? 



TALE IN WHICH THE MORAL PRECEDES THE STORY. 49 

There must have been a time when life as we know it in its 
organized expression, did not exist on earth, and when neither 
animal nor vegetable w^as. There must have been conditions 
which brought about their existence. To discover these condi- 
tions, to rejDroduce them, and with such restart creation and a 
new series of evolution, here was ni}^ problem, and to it I gave my 
undivided attention. 

It was with no thought of placing myself in the relation of 
Deity to matter, neither did I have any of the suparstitions which 
coming down to us from the Middle Ages, yet linger in respectable 
proportion among the generation of the time. No alchemy or 
black art was to further my plans, but a careful study of the laws 
of nature, I became convinced, would yield me the secret of the 
origin of life. 

Taken all in all, that simplest combination made in Nature's 
workshop, so simple that the ancients constituted it one of the 
four elements, water, the union of two atoms of hydrogen with 
one of oxygen, is one of the most remarkable in its powers and 
properties, its capacities for change and modification outside of 
the common everyday notions, which we have in regard to it. It 
enters into every composition. It is the without which nothing 
of existence, constitutes the major portion of the make-up of ma- 
terial organisms, and is seven-eighths of man himself. This must 
be the basis of my experiment, the link between organic and inor- 
ganic substance, I determine, and conditions being imposed with 
auxiliary materials to induce cell formation and gi^owth, and with 
bioplasm once started and subject to control and modification, 
what possibilities lay before the scientist. 

Experiment succeeded experiment; years rolled along; success 
failed to mark my name with distinction, but still I persisted in 
my efforts. Wrinkled age took the place of youth. What had 
been perhaps a praiseworthy effort in the young man was the 
visionary scheme of a crank, in one past sixty. So the world 
thought, and not only thought, but unkindly shouted aloud. 

My cosmos was a glass sphere. Within and separate from all 
external matter pure distilled water occupied one-third the vol- 



50 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

ume. Nitrogen, ox3^gen and the various gasses formed an at- 
mosphere, weightier and more complex than that with which we 
of the workl are surrounded. Here in my miniature universe, 
held in solution, iron and phosphorus and other elements lay 
ready for the fiat which should go forth to transform and unite 
into a living whole the discordant parts. 

For 3^ears experiments with the actinic rays of light with 
electricity in its numberless forms, galvanism and magnetism had 
been followed up, each change carefully noted down, the errors 
deducted, but the sphere in its contents remained inert. 

A severe ilness kept me from my investigations for several 
weeks, when becoming convalescent one morning I entered my 
studio, and beheld the thing accomplished for which I had so 
long labored. 

A viscid, quivering mass of jelly-like tisisue lay submerged in the 
water at the bottom of the globe. With eagerness I grasped the 
sphere to bear it to the light for a closer inspection. Weak from 
illness and excitement, the globe slipped from my hands and my 
cosmos lay shattered upon the floor. 

The shock must have been severe, for the mass of bioplasm 
which lay upon the floor had yielded up the ghost of its ephemeral 
and unconscious life, and was but dead organized matter wdience 
no descent of species could be evolved. 

However, my life-long labor had been crowned with success. 
Rumors of my wonderful discovery went abroad. Savants of all 
nations and speaking every language were my guests. Chemical 
analysis and the researches of scientists pronounced my discovery- 
genuine, but it Avas thought advisable to keep the matter quietj 
until a repetition of the experiment might be made, and the living 
tissue again formed. 

My residence, I had forgotten to state, was close by one of our 
great universities, famed for scientific instniction, and fully 
abreast of the times in the new departure of learning. The pro- 
fessors of the institution took much interest in my success and to- 
gether we experimented anew. 



TALE IN WHICH THE MORAL PRECEDES THE STORY. 51 

Among the students at this university was a nephew of mine, 
who made his home with me, a hright lad, fond of a joke, and not 
at all particular as to whom he made the butt of one. 

One evening when the professors, as usual, were at my home 
discussing their scientific themes, with a boldness unaccountable 
in one so young, my nephew, taking part in the conversation, 
began to deride the claims of science and to urge the superiority 
of the common, every-day practicability of the Philistine over the 
learning and deep research of the sage, and the sweetness and 
light of Mathew Arnold and his apostles. 

The argument waxed warm. Aged superciliousness challenged 
youthful conceit. But the clincher came at last when my nephew, 
driven to the wall by the united words of his adversaries, calmly 
threw a bomb into the ranks O'f his opponents, which scattered 
them in dismay, and this was, that the mass of bioplasm, which I 
had fondly till then supposed the first in a new series of creation, 
the triumph of my mind over the secrets of the universe, and in 
which all my scientific friends had with mej agreed, was but plain 
ordinary gelatine purchased at the village store and surreptitiously 
introduced into my cosmic contrivance. 

The scientific corps of the university bade me a frigid adieu, 
Imking me with the exposure of their pretentions, as though I 
was not as much a sufferer as they. 

I have given up scientific research and have settled down to the 
plain life of a farmer. I am not disposed to so much egotism in 
my ideas of pantheism and a world without a Divine Master. I 
have no interest more in the origin of species, the descent of man, 
Darwinism, Huxleyism, and all the other scientificisms ; but if I 
am not exactly sure of the truth of the Mosaic account of the 
creation, I have become a thorough churchman, and find I am sat- 
isfied to rest the mysteries of creation with a higher Power than 
man's. 

My nephew? He is at the head of a great trust. Well, he 
always was a Philistine and his income is big enough to buy up 
any amount of sweetness and light. 



Hwbeel to tbe 6rand Canyon of the Colorado. 



For two Imndred miles the muddy, yellow waters of the Colo- 
rado, churned to a mad foam, tear along the rugged hed of a 
canyon a mile or more in depth. A score of Yosemites might be 
hidden in the great gorge where the river breaks through the pine- 
clad plateau of northern Arizona. It was here that Nature set 
her masterpiece, to which pyramid and Parthenon are as naught. 

Seventy-two miles of stage-road lie between the rim of the 
Grand Canyon of the Colorado and Flagstaff on the line of the 
Santa Fe-Pacific. Few there are of our seventy odd millions, 
who take the journey, though it is m.ade with a certain degree of 
comfort. Even women tourists do not hesitate at the stage ride. 
They feel repaid with the view at the end of the trip for ten hours 
of jolting over boulders in a vehicle which threatens to topple at 
every sudden turn. The road is mapped for bicycles, too, and the 
Coconino wheelmen give an occasional run from Flagstaff. A 
stage follows them to pick up the weary, who begin to drop out all 
along the way from Hell's Half Acre to Moqui. 

Two of us — W. N. Bush, principal of the San Francisco Poly- 
technic High School, and the writer — made the trip in the early 
part of October, 1897. Ours were bicycles geared for the smooth 
lanes of Golden Gate Park and the roads about the bay. This 
high gearing doubled the tediousness of the journey through the 
hummocks of the pine forests, across the spurs of the San Fran- 
cisco mountains, and along the cowpaths of the mesa, where cacti 
seemed to lie in wait for a chance to puncture. 

It was daylight when we left Flagstaff. A frost lay on the 
ground, for at an elevation of 7,000 feet the nights are cool and 
snapjoy even in October. For four or five mikes' the road parallels 
the railway, and then turns into the natural park, which flanks the 




O 03 
oS 

< B 



1-1 3 
O 



54 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

eastern slope of the mountains. There are nine miles of easy 
grades and hard roadbed with the shadows of the pines, as pro- 
tection from the sun's glare. At several points confusing branches 
lead off to the cliff dwellings in Walnut canyon and to the caves 
once inhabited, it may have been, by the ancestors of the Pueblo 
Indians of today. Here and there are patches of fine cinders, the 
not very remote output of the craters which lie all about this 
section of Arizona. Then comes a drop from the mesa to a little 
valley, used as a sheep range, and the wdieelman's difficulty begins. 
The stage has cut great ruts in the soft soil. This gives the rider 
the option of the sharp ridge, or the left-hand or the right-hand 
rut. Whichever selection he makes he will rue his choice. Weeds 
jjorder the ruts, a tangle growth covers the ridge, and the wiry 
branches wind about the spokes with a persistency of evil. 

Beyond are the hills, with many a weary climb, a steep way, 
strewn with bowlders from the mountain torrents, which come 
tumbling down when a cloud bursts on the peaks above. The tops 
of the higher summits are bare but half way up, their flanks show 
the yellow sheen of the aspens, gaudy with the touch of the frost. 
The i^ines form a fringe oi .sombre green below. 

As we toiled with the ascent, off to the east, higher and higher, 
rose Sunset Peak, ruddy-brown and bare. There is an Arizona 
tradition that never a day in the year fell so cloudy but that the 
sun found some rift through which to bathe the peak in light. 
From sunrise to sunset it throws back a mellow glow. 

Hell's Half Acre is not half named. Struggle through it 
with a wheel and you will increase its dimensions, too. By some 
strange juxta-position of the cycling map the Garden of Eden lies 
next to it; but the garden is a myth, for where we should have 
found it, it was not; only a repetend of the Half Acre on a 
scale somewhat less, habitat of the horned toad, and of at least 
one tarantula, which I saw and killed. 

After jesting at the expense of myself, my wheel, and the mis- 
fortunes of both, Bush had constituted himself an advance guard, 
steadily increasing the distance between us. Twenty-eight miles 



AWHEEL TO THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. 



55 



beyond Flagstaff are crossroads, both a menace and a puzzle to the 
strange cyclist. There is a signpost from which the signs had 
fallen. Bush found the boards near by, fitted them to the rusted 




LOOKING ACROSS THE GRAND CANYON FROM THE SADDLE OF AYER'S PEAK. 

Although it is midday the foreground appears black from the dense shadow cast 
by the canyon's wall, beneath which the camera stood. 



nails, read wrong, (he had been warned at Flagstaff always to 
turn to the left) and took a rough mountain trail, which led him 
some five miles off the main road. He found his way by climbing 
to the top of an old crater, where he could see, miles ahead, the 



56 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

two ruts the wheels of the stage had made, towards which, should- 
ering his bicycle, he trudged in an air-line. 

Half an hour afterwards I reached the signpost from which the 
signs had again fallen. The most inviting way at the crossroads 
leads to the right. There is a long vista of a down grade. It 
was well for me just then that two horsemen came in from the 
south and warned me to keep straight ahead. The way to the 
right, which opened with such promise, led to the little Colorado, 
and the Mormon settlement at Tuba City. It is a waterless 
stretch of nearly seventy miles upon which many a luckless wheel- 
man has gone astray. This is the road which an officer of the 
Coconino Cycling Club once took. Hours afterwards a rescue 
party found him almost dead of thirst. When an Arizonan can 
miss his way in this wilderness, it is not at all strange that a 
tender-foot, as a newcomer to the territory is called, should go 
astray. The chance of meeting a human being is of the slightest ; 
there is less chance for the discovery of water. To go without it 
for a few hours is agony, to be without it for the twenty-four 
sometimes means death. 

Some miles beyond the Tuba City crossing is a little plateau 
covered with scrubby juniper. The way to it is through a break 
in the mountain w^all. There the road which runs to the west of 
San Francisco Peak fomis a junction with that which we had 
taken. Thence to the stage relay station at Cedar Ranch thirty- 
five miles from Flagstaff, the grade descends and the wheels run 
of themselves. To the weary bicyclist this little stretch of down- 
hill is a mighty relief. It was past noon when we reached Cedar 
Ranch. Water, ice-cold, piped from a nearby spring, was there ; 
the first we had had since leaving the railway. The exertion in 
the thin, dry air had so parched throat and tongue that we reached 
this, the midway point of the journey, almost speechless. 

The later half of the trip to the canyon's rim presents less 
difficulty. Bicyclists avoid the stage road after leaving Cedar 
Ranch, and ride the cow trails. These lead away from the road 
oftentimes a half mile or more, and the wheelmen must then risk 



AWHEEL TO THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO. 



5? 



a ride across the stunted vegetation^ dodging the little clumps of 
spiny cacti, until he finds a path more nearly paralleling the line 
followed by the stage. There are some miles of plain sloping off 
towards the Little Colorado, and then comes a series of gulches 




AVER'S PEAK WITH ITS CASTELLATED SUMMIT. 
The photograph plainly shows the farther wall of the canyon, thirteen miles away. 



through which the roadway winds until it strikes the edge of the 
great Coconino pine forest, which covers the plateau to the south 
of the Grand Canyon. At Moqui, almost to the last relay station, 
wheels show^ed signs of punctures. There was riding of flat tires 



58 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

and a final walk of ten miles into Thurber's Camp. Wrecked 
wheels and riders when they retnrned to Flagstaff went l)y stage. 

Thnrber's Camj^ lies on the very brink of the canyon. There is 
a. comfortable log cabin, containing sitting-room, dining-room and 
kitchen, and ample lodging accommodations are provided in 
floored tents. 

I canght the first glimpse of the canyon by moonlight. ]^ot 
300 yards from the camp is one of the best points of vantage 
along the wdiole 200 miles of this gigantic fissnre. The color 
tones which are so varied by day were lacking, mnch of the pano- 
rama lay in shadow, bnt the view conld disappoint no one. The 
shimmering needles, which crown Ayer's Peak raising its battle- 
ments ont of a bottomless abyss, stood ont in the foreground. To 
the right a series of gorges led down to the river, which could be 
faintly seen. To the left an endless chain of canyons seemed to 
sweep off towards the dim divide, where the river must find its 
way. Castles of rock rose on every hand out of the depths, and 
back of all lay the grim, dark wall which marked the other side 
of the canyon. 

Photographs flatter most landscapes as they do most persons. 
It is not so with the Grand Canyon. Neither photographs, paint- 
ings, nor words do it justice. The realization is greater than the 
anticipation. There is a vastness of detail that seems almost 
infinite. 

Along the river above Thurber's are many rocky promontories 
from which as many changeful views may be had. Two of the 
most celebrated are Moran's Point and Bissell's Point. The artist 
painted his great picture from the point, which bears his name. 
At Bissell's, some time ago, two Yale students were killed by a 
stroke of lightning. Go where you will, look where you will, the 
scene enchants you. 

It was my good fortune to view a thunder-storm in the Grand 
Canyon from the rim, and to see a cloud burst on Bright Angel, 
one of the most conspicuous of the pinnacles. Clouds surged from 
gorge to gorge w?th the musketry accompaniment of thunder. 



60 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

Rain fell on one peak, while another, not half a mile away, smiled 
in the snn shine. There was a vividness of color, which it takes a 
moist day to bring out. The pfevaling tone in the canyon is a 
subdued red. There are tints of yellows and butfs and sage greens. 
Pines and junipers with their restful verdure relieve the eye. 
Away below the Colorado rolls its muddy volume furiously along 
the chasm. With the perpetual shift of light and shade the scene 
constantly changes. New castles and pinnacles, unseen before, 
come into view with kaleidoscopic rapidity. The buttressed walls 
of the abyss disclose their secrets charmingly. Dome and rninaret 
glint with a stray ray from the sun, again to pass into shadow and 
disappear that some new charm may strike the eye. It is nature's 
lecture without words, but illustrated in a way that the cunning 
of man can never imitate. Her stereopticon may not be copied. 

From a hundred points you may look sheer down a thousand 
feet. You may stand on one of a score of overhanging rocks 
where you cannot see the hither wall — only the bottom of the 
chasm. From out the depths rise great cones like volcanic isles 
out of the sea. The canyon has its thousands of ramifications. 
There is a labyrinth of lesser fissures, which join the central gorge. 
The farther wall lies thirteen miles awa}^, and between, it is as if 
the bottom had dropped out of the earth, save where the jagged 
peaks rise from the very heart of the canyon. Across and to the 
north a hundred and more miles away, the dim blue line of a 
mountain chain in Utah stands against the horizon. Between 
canyon wall and mountain is a pine-covered tableland, plainly 
green in the foreground, and gradually merging away into the in- 
distinct. 

The walls of the Grand Canyon rise from five to seven thousand 
feet above the bed of the river. There are few places where they 
may be scaled. At various points cliff dwellings are found perched 
for the most part on pinnacles seemingly inaccessible, but in extent 
and variety they do not compare with those in Walnut Canyon 
near Flagstaff. 

There are views to be had within the canyon and from the river's 



62 



RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 



channel well worth the seeing, but the rim presents the points of 
vantage. Several trails descend to the river. Hance's new trail 
is the one most traveled. It zigzags for seven miles along the 
bluffs like an almost infinite series of Z's. Hance, the guide, is a 
character. He has a little homestead on tlie rim and spends his 
spare time and dollars in repairing the trail. The task is an end- 
less one, as every few weeks there is a washout and the work has to 
be done again. The trip by trail to the river is made with mulea 
and is not without its spice of danger. 




tu Batle at Clifton t 



ns Tt ms. 



Blind of an eye, tlie fiddler played 
on a thrQe-stringed violin; and 
ever the same old tune be 
made, vi^ore ever the same old 
grin. The rough board floor 
and the rougher wall to the 
jostling crowd, they creaked. 
There was beer, mescal or the 
Scotch high-ball while the 
fiddle screamed and shrieked. 

So the miner danced in his wild, 
weird might to the blaze of 
the tallow dip, and varied it 
all with brawl and fight and 
a ready hand at hip. For the 
smile he fought of his lady 
fair, though painted she was 
like sin, and the fiddler kept 
to his lonesome air and ever 
he seemed to grin; for the 
lady fair was fair by paint 
since ever the Indian cross, 
and ever and aye the mixed- 
blood taint showed plain 
through the surface gloss. 

And the glasses clinked at the 
sloppy bar and the oaths they 
were somewhat rude, for this 
is a tale of things that are 
and of social form that's 
crude. So they danced and 
drank and drank and swore, 
and once was a pistol shot, 
and a form lay stretched on 



the rough board floor, and a 
man that was, was not. But 
they took the corpse to a near- 
by tent, and on they went 
with the dance, for as yet the 
night it was not half spent; 
manana, to-morrow, per- 
chance? 

And the frontier keeps to a two- 
fold law like the moral code 
for sin, and the man who 
tempts it must be raw if he 
wears a dusky skin. For the 
frontier holds to its double 
code, and the man who shot 
was white, and the man he 
hurried to death's abode, he 
was neither black nor light. 

It is treat and dance and dance 
and treat to each of the paint- 
ed bunch— mescal or beer and 
a cigareet, by way of a Mex- 
ican lunch. And the dance 
went on and the fiddler played 
on his three-stringed violin, 
yet ever the same old tune he 
made and ever he seemed to 
grin. 

And the moon went down and the 
day put out the lamps in the 
desert sky; till the sun came 
searching all about with his 
blear and torrid eye. 



64 



RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 



ns Tt m\m f)m Been. 



'Twas the farewell to meat before 

Lent, 

The baile at Clifton, I went. 

'Twas a harpist without any harp, 

Gnitar and a polka, G. sharp. 

One-two, twang-tAVO, one-two, 

twang- two, 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two, 
Twang— twang— twang— twang— 
Twang-two, twang-two, twang. 

'Twas the baile at Clifton we met, 
An eye that was blacker than 
jet, 
'Twas a finger that snapped Cas- 
tanet, 
A figure that danced in our set. 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two, 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two, 
Twang— twang— twang— twang — 
Twang-two, twang-two, twang. 



*Twas the rhythm of an endless 
old tune, 
The air with wild fragrance was 
strewn, 
Carcarones at random were 
thrown, 
The music kept on all alone. 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two. 
One-two, twang- two, one-two, 

twang-two, 
Twang— twang— twang— twang— 
Twang-two, twang-two, twang. 



'Twas a word betwixt dance and 
the next, 
A chaperon plainly was vexed; 
'Twas as well she was also per- 
plexed, 
Her Spanish reply was a text. 



One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two. 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two. 
Twang— twang— twang— twang— 
Twang-two, twang-two, twang. 

'Twas an endless refrain of the 
strings. 

An echo of musical things; 
'Twas to dance the Chihuahua 
quadrille. 
All eight snapped the time with 
a will. 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two, 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two. 
Twang— twang— twang — twang — 
Twang-two, twang-two, twang. 

'Twas the turn in the whirl of 
the dance. 
At meeting, at parting, a glance; 
'Twas the heart of a man to en- 
trance. 
The baile, the music, perchance. 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-tAVO, 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two, 
Twang— twang— twang— twang— 
Twang-two, twang-two, twang. 

'Twas the baile at Clifton near 
dawn; 
The guests of the evening were 
gone; 
'Twas the ultimate strain on the 
strings, 
A haunting refrain that she 
sings. 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two. 
One-two, twang-two, one-two, 

twang-two. 
Twang— twang— twang— twang— 
Twang-two, twang-two, twang. 



Cbe Jtpacbeia, Jin Arizona €pic of the 
€igbtie$. 



Nor feathered arrow nor twanging bow. 

Nor the flint-tipped spear, I sing, 
But a Winchester new (I'm modern, you know, 
And I use the slcill of my brainy foe 

And the scientific thing.) 

My god is a snalve or a crooked stick. 
The great bear's claws, an adobe brick, 

Or anything under the sun 
My faith's the faith of the Ishmaelite, 

(Ever a treaclierous one.) 
To all mankind, or brown or white. 
Mine is the gospel of hate and spite. 

When the cactus blooms on the mountain side, 

And the grama's green in tlie valley, 
I blanket my steed for a wild old ride. 
With carbine and cartridge and pistol beside, 
Start off on a murderous sally. 

I skulk in the rocks of some canyon box, 

Or stealthily lie in wait 
For the passer-by with a cunning eye 

And a hand that's sure as Fate. 

By the coppery gleam of the dried-up stream 
That flows through the Gulch of Cliase's 

You'll find I have strayed, the result of my raid 
In more than a few faint traces. 

I slaughter and steal for our common weal, 

I keep the land in a stew, 
By way of a feeler I raid the Gila, 

And laugh at the troops pursue. 



66 RAGTIME PHILOSOl'HY. 



I'm here, I'm there, I am everywhere : 

Oh! I set up a cry and hue 
From river forks to Rancher York's 

And all along the Blue. 

There's a merry wail keeps with my trail 

Across the h'an Simon, 
So I hide in the towers of the Chiricahuas, 

Or dash for the Mogollon. 

I signal my folk with a column of smoke, 

However far asunder, 
Or I leave a sign when I ride the line 

And mock at the Bluecoats' blunder. 

There's a bloody path that points my wrath. 

Ere I strike the Sierra Madre, 
For I pillage and kill, for I work my will, 

When I visit my oLl compadre. 

To add to the zest of the trooper's quest 

When off the reservation, 
I lead him astray in my own sweet way, 

Prolong my little vacation. 

When the winter is nigh, I begin to sigh 

For blankets and beef, the best, 
So I set up a cry, with a tearful eye 
(It's a trick I try), and| by and by 
The Government does the rest. 




-^ 



nidbt m tbe Desert. 



Over the mountain the moon drifts southward, painting the glories or 

night; 
RoclvS are her canvas, and moonbeams colors, shadows of darkness 

with light; 

Dropping a glow by some cave-black fissure, craters and lava among, 
Touching the scene like an old-time master, painting a silent, sweet 
song. 

Cacti lilve sentinel souls outposted, pointing a warning at hand, 
Waiting, unpassioned, the* ages, standing guard for an ancient, weird 
land. 

^ ^ ^ ^ Hi 

A mass of rocks, a waste of sand, a scorching sun by day, 

By night the moon's pale gleams; 
A pest of things, weird forms of life, of Nature's scheme, the play, 

A dying world's vague dreams. 




Cleopatra's Soliloquy. 



Ho, shout a joyous paean, 
For Antony is come! 
I've won him, I have won him 
From honor and from Rome; 
No more Octavius' sister 
Shall charm my lord away; 
Mj^ love hath touched his heart- 
strings, 
They quiver to its play; 
The Roman dame so stately 
He bids to leave his home; 
Henceforth the world's great mas- 
ter 
From me shall never roam. 
I'll bind him with Love's fillets. 
Like chains of beaten gold. 
Like links of adamantine 
As surely they shall hold. 
He'll learn to love thee, Egypt, 
Whilst ling'ring by my side; 
My gorgeous barge shall float him 
O'er Nile's slow-moving tide. 
He'll learn to love thee, Egypt, 
As loves thy dark-eyed queen; 
From wife, from home, from kin- 
dred, 
INIy charms shall surely wean. 
Crown me the Roman's victor. 
Place oak upon my brow. 
Crown me since earth's great 

master 
My charms liaA^e vanquished now. 
'Tis herald of his coming 
Adown the distant street, 
Stop heart, thine anxious beat- 
ings, 



For Love and Fame shall greet— 
The lotus round by temples. 
The clear pearls for my hair, 
Gi-een gold and rubies give me. 
The fairest of earth's fair; 
My lute with voice of silver, 
In melody love shall blend, 
I Avould my hero's footsteps 
Through Music's maze might 

wend ; 
The festal board, his coming. 
The golden chalice of wine 
With fairest buds that blossom. 
The amarynth round it twine; 
The lotus dip in amber 
To cool the raging blood; 
Mingle the snows of Ida, 
With crimson frothing flood. 
Wild be the rites we cherish 
Till Lethe's dark'ning wave 
Sweep through the hall of ban- 
quet 
Each slumberer doth lave; 
Till Rome in dreamy aeons, 
Long ages far agone, 
Shall seem a thing that's perished 
'Neath Egypt's glorious dawn; 
Till world shall fill with wonder 
At deeds of Egypt's queen, 
Till Nile so calmly flowing 
Awake from sleep serene; 
Till Morrows flee with swiftness 
On Hours' pinions light, 
That birds, Avhich skim Horizon,, 
O'ertaken flee the Night; 
Till Greece shall pale in glory 



CLEOPATRA S SOLILOQUY. 



69 



'Neath Egypt's grand surprise 
And Tyre forgot in story 
Beliold our Plioenix rise. 
Scatter attar of roses 
With perfume, music sweet, 
With wealth, with gems that daz- 
zle, 
My Antony I greet. 
Robe me as Isis beauteous. 
With hues of rainbow gay; 
Unloose my ebon tresses, 
By zephyrs wooed in play. 
Light be the hearts at banquet. 
For Cupid free may rove; 
Love be the tlieme of gay hearts. 
The mighty master Love. 
Hark! 'tis his footsteps falling, 
I feel his presence nigh, 
Haste ye, oh sluggard Moments, 
Haste or I fail and die. 
'Twas the breeze in muffled rumb- 
lings. 
Which Fancy misconstrued 
Ah! Time, thou'rt cruel master. 
With Man hast endless feud. 
Wide through the Past's long vis- 
tas 
My Fancy trembling plays, 
My Mind can scarcely place me, 
That far-off distant haze. 
I seem to hear strange voices, 
A mingling, murm'ring hum, 
A figure glides before me. 
What, Antony, art thou come? , 



Tell him I will not see him; 

Tell him I hate his love; 

His heart shall sheathe this 

dagger. 
By all the gods above. 
But stay, not thus I punish 



With angry, taunting word; 

Tell him that I have perished; 

Then see if his heart be stirred. 

The golden clouds of sunset 

Sinlv down a mass of flame; 

So falls my wild ambition, 

So fall'n is Egypt's fame. 

The thin air quivers, trembles. 

O'er desert sands so hot, 

Like breath of Love expiring, 

Tremulous, lone, forgot. 

How still, how calm, how deathly, 

The waves along the shore! 

Like soul of INIan a-passing 

To voiceless Nevermore! 

The Nile hath ceased to ripple. 

One scarce may mark its flow, 

But in its tides so stilly 

I read a scroll of woe. 

Oh! I have wronged thee, Antony, 

To him the tidings give; 

Go haste thee, speed thee, Char- 

mian. 
And tell him that I live. 



The gods, they have deceived me. 

Mine eyes with this to greet, 

My hero-love, my Antony, 

Lies bleeding at my feet. 

Speak Charmian! End this horror! 

Tell me in dream I rave. 

Oh! wake from hideous torture. 

From agony, oh, save! 

Ye gods, thou, Isis, Eros, 

Save! Hear my pleading cry! 

Oh, Zeus and Great Osiris, 

Let not my hero die! 

In vain— the spirit lingers 

To test its pinions light, 

Before the sun hath sunken 

He'll bid the world good-night. 



70 



RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 



Here Charmian, soothe with bal- 
sam, 
I'll lave his pallid head. 
He gasps— a sudden shudder— 
Oh! Antony, art thou dead? 



I thought I was Avith Antony 
In dreamy Long Ago. 
Our life was calm and joyous 
As Nile's deep, steady flow. 
And in the heart's great rapture 
I woke from happy dream, 
And misty shapes took form then 
Of many a halcyon theme. 
INIy heart is dead and bitter, 
Like ashes after the heat. 
But Avith a calm unshrinking 
My fate I go to meet. 
Little doth Caesar Octavius 
Dream of his plans betrayed. 
Ah! not in Roman triumph 
I'll grace his grand parade. 
Prepare the sleeping potion. 
Unloose the venomous asi) 



From yonder golden trinket 
With gemmed and studded clasp. 
Ah me! The sleep is painless. 
Wherefore should I not dare? 
I'll roam in fields Elysian, 
Beneath my Antony's care. 
No grim, exacting Charon 
Shall w^aft me o'er the tide. 
But with the wings of Psyche 
I'll seek my hero's side. 
No fear shall daunt my purpose 
For through my veins there run 
The ichors of the kingly. 
The blood of Macedon. 
Then farewell Earth! I perish 
With set of evening sun; 
No effort can revoke it. 
My earth-life soon is done. 
How sAveet the soothing lan- 
guors 
That through my A^eins do creep! 
Oh, AA'elcome! Avelcome, Antony! 



And Egypt's queen doth sleep. 



Biotopsis, J\ Plaaiarlsm after Bryant 



Go thou, if wearied with the spirit's fret, 

With all those cares that vexing: dull th- soul. 

And sad of thought hy\ the complaining tongue 

Of those, the multitude, for whom a life 

Robbed of its sweetness, blasted hopes, the stern, 

Unresting struggle and the purpose lost, 

Have nourished envy in the open world. 

And study life. The vision will afford 

Thee contemplation; thou canst gain, in truth. 

A curious knowledge; thou shalt see the few 

That walk in peace, linked in the loving arms 

Of Fortune, from the cradle to the tomb. 

And them who eagerly took up the race 

Of Life and ran, and as they neared the goal 

Espied the prize, and straining brain and nerve 

And muscle, yet ran on and faster ran. 

The goal was gained; the cup was given to quaff. 

Yet only filled with gall. To such life as 

It should be ends and envy doth complete 

The course, or else the trial prove a blessing. 

Thou canst have communhigs with the worlds 
That were. To him who views aright the call 
Of busy cities and the throngs of men, 
That line the streets, the jostling crowds that sway 
Amid their markets wide, or tenants lone, 
In cabins rude, amongst the gorges huge 
That gore with many a scar the bristling sides 
Of dark Sahama, types of every form 
Which lies before us— these are not alone 
His images. Glance backward. Canst thou see 
The Aryan hive swarming beside the great 
Salt seas of Scythia? Butj comes a day 
And they are gone; the Tartar drives his herd 
Where stood their villages, nor doth withstand 



72 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

One monument to mark their banishment. 

What warriors seaching out new lands to waste 

First led the blue-eyed sons of Iran forth 

To view the rock-groined fjords, whose waves beat loud 

Against the Dovrefjeld wrestling by the Pole 

The Arctic Midnight, or what minstrel sang 

Amidst the upland jungles of the Scindh 

The fertile steppes, the corn lands rich, that lay 

B'eside the mighty Oxus, vanished bardi 

Forgotten erst late Homer found a birth 

Unkenned? What Belisarius armed his chiefs 

To conquest and regained a sovran's realm, 

Yet clothed in rags died begging pence? 

All these 
From Life's bright course long since have passed away, 
And swept them out into the dead, dark night 
Communionless, whence comes no cry, or like 
A comet Avith opposing train flashing 
About the cynosure, as near the sun 
Awhile, then taking up his orbit doth 
Depart the stranger guest upon that curve 
That never can return, or else perchance 
To seek another sun, to join the worlds 
That frame the galaxy. 

The frenzi d crowds 
That cheer the wheels of Juggernaut, rich with 
Red gore and dripping blood, on o'er the blind 
And writhing throng and offer sacrifice, 
The Aztec prostrate by some idol's shrine 
In fair Tenochtitlan, or dancing at 
The feast of flowers, both are but the old 
And fleeting incidents, which go to fill 
The hours that make the short-lived day of man, 
Soon o'er, but which another day at length 
Shall re-enact and a third time shall come 
Its morrow, and so on throughout the long. 
Dull repetitions of the ages. 

The ant 
Which builds her chambered cones above the sands 
Of Kalahari, yet whose tunnels sure. 
That deep down undermine, strike the pure vein 



BIOTOPSIS, A PLAGIARSIM AFTER BRYANT. 73 

Of some refreshing rill beneath the hard, 
Forbidding, sun-struck waste, or wandering forth 
Across the plain, lays siege or storms and takes 
feome rival citadel, may teach, O man. 
Thy littleness. She toils, doth plan, doth pass 
Away. What more canst thou? 

•^ And what if thou 

Do fall, and calling none, do hear the cry 

Or heed? Thou soon shalt heed not of thyself, 

For in the endless marches of the years 

Shalt thou but count one atom which tne heel 

Of Time hath turned upon and crushed and left 

Unrecognized andl shapeless in the wreck, 

Chaotic masses, of all earthly things. 

If thou in anguish do cry out whereof 

Things are and wherefore, all the senseless shapes 

Of earth, that yearty take unto themselves 

New forms of beauty, or the granite rocks 

That underlie the grandest monuments 

Of Nature, handiwork sublime, mountains 

Her giant offspring all, both those that yield 

The thirsty streams' supply and they, war-scarred, 

Which standing by the sea, keep guard along 

The continent, or yet the quickened life 

That throbs to beat its own destruction, all 

The bitter strife that chills the heaving bosom 

Of the great race of Man, and pondering long. 

Do cherish secret bitterness against 

The unknown cause which brought thee hither, why 

The sullen earth should brood and countless throngs 

Bring forth that suffer for a day, then heap 

Her charnel house, what purpose is subserved 

In every change, what good is gained that things 

Should be, look out upon the glorious night 

And gaze into the depths of heaven. Behold 

World after world peopling all space and strive 

To grasp the thought of endlessness, and when 

The vast conception has been formed, thou first 

Shalt learn thy meanness to despise, which Time 

With healing hand to pity yet shall change. 



Kagtime : 



Ttt tbe ease of an Jfnterican Dreyfus. 

The majorty of the Schley court has done everything within its 
power to make the Admiral the next President of the United States. 
This is not France, and thq people of this country will not tolerate 
an American Dreyfus case. 

Whether right or wrong, the American people regard Schley as 
the hero of the battle of Santiago. Their verdict is sustained by 
Admiral Dewey. The technical quibbles of Admirals Benham and 
Eamsay find no weight in the great referendum of public opinion, 
which is the final judgment. 

For the purpose of analysis, the findings of the majority of the 
Schley court are quoted: 

"Commodore Schley, in command of the flying squadron, should 
have proceeded with utmost dispatch off Cienfuegos, and should 
have maintained a close blockade of that port. 

"He should have endeavored, on May 23, at Cienfuegos, to 
obtain information regarding the Spanish squadron by communi- 
cating with the insurgents at the place designated in the memor- 
andum delivered to him at 8:15 A. M. of that date. 

"He should have proceeded from Cienfuegos to Santiago de 
Cuba with all dispatch, and should have disposed his vessels with 
a view of intercepting the enemy in any attempt to pass the flying 
squadron. 

"He should not have delayed the squadron for the Eagle. 

"He should not have made the retrograde turn westward with 
his squadron. 

"He should have promptly obeyed the Navy Department's order 
of May 25. 

"He should have endeavored to capture or destroy the Spanish 
vessels at anchor near the entrance of Santiago harbor on May 29 
and 30. i 



RAGTIME. 



"He did not do his utmost with the force under his command 
to capture or destroy the Colon and other vessels of the enemy 
which he attacked on May 31. , , . i, i 

"By commencing the engagement on July 3, with the port bat- 
tery, and turning the Brooklyn around with port helm, Commodore 
Schley caused her to lose distance and position with the Spanish 
vessels— especially with the Viscaya and Colon. 

"The turn of the Brooklyn to starboard was made to avoid get- 
tino- into dangerous proximity to the Spanish vessels. The turn 
was made toward the Ttexas, and caused that vessel to stop and 
hack her engines to avoid possible collision. 

"Admiral Schley did injustice to Lieutenant-Commander AC 
Hodgson m publishing only a portion of the correspondence which 

passed between them. 

"Commodore Schley's conduct in connection with the events ot 
the Santiago campaign prior to June 1, 1898, was characterized 
by vacillation, dilatoriness and lack of enterprise. 

"His official reports regarding the coal supply and the coaling 
facilities of the flying squadron were inaccurate and misleading 

"His conduct during the battle of July 3d was self-possessed 
and he encouraged, in his own person, his subordinate officers and 
men to fight courageously." 

This finding of Schley guilty upon technicalities is merely the 
converse of that specious red tape by which our courts, Superior 
and Supreme, make mur^lerers innocent and set assassins free. 
The Supreme Court of a certain State once reversed a judgment be- 
cause the lower court had said: "This is the law, and it is com- 
mon sense." It was held that common sense and the law were not 
identical and that the Judge erred in coupling them. 

Common sense and the majority report of the Schley court are 
not agreed, but in this instance the good, common sense of the 
American people is without the jurisdiction of any court, civil or 

martial. . , 

What a pitiful record of petty jealousies, deceit, and mental 

astigmatism has been made. "Schley ought to have done this. 



76 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

Schley ought not to have clone that/' is the burden of findings 
dealing with the most petty details of a voyage at sea. Had 
Schley done just as his censors 'would have had him do, and had 
he left undone what they, in their technical wisdom, declare 
should not have been done, they would have praised him, though 
Cervera and his fleet escaped. 

Lincoln had his clique of detractors. Grant had to do his hard- 
est fighting when assailed by calumniators in the North. There 
was the cabal against Washington. Schley defeats the Spaniards, 
wins one of the greatest naval victories known' to history, destroys 
a fleet which European naval critics had regarded as invincible 
against America, and must spend the remainder of his life in com- 
batting malice and envy at home. 

Cervera, the conquered, is made a hero in America. His con- 
querer, the majority of the court would make a malefactor. 

Benham and Eamsay profess to think that Schley's official re- 
ports regarding coal supplies and coal facilities were inaccurate 
and misleading. They make no mention of information withheld 
from Schley — information that he was entitled to receive, infor- 
mation that was vital to his command, suppressed through envy 
or a worse motive. 

Contrast the findings of these Admirals, whose names were un- 
known to half the American people before they were placed upon 
the court with the! manly opinion of Admiral Dewey : 

"In the opinion of the undersigned the passage from Key West 
to Cienfuegos was made by the flying squadron with all dispatch, 
Commodore Schley having in view the importance of arriving off 
Cienfuegos with as much coal as possible in the ships' bunkers. 
The blockade of Cienfuegos was effective. 

"Commodore Schley, in permitting the steamer Adula to enter 
the port of Cienfuegos expected to obtain information concerning 
the Spanish squadron from her when she came out. 

"The passage from Cienfuegos to a point about twenty-two 
miles south of Santiago was made with as much dispatch as was 
possible while keeping the squadron a unit. 



RAGTIME. 77 

"The blockade of Santiago was effective. 

"Commodore Schley was the Senior officer of our squadron off 
Santiago, when the Spanish squadron attempted to escape on 
the morning'^ of July 3, 1898. He was in absolute command, and 
is entitled to the credit due to such commanding officer for the 
glorious victory which resulted in the total destruction of the 
Spanish ships/^ 

If a vote were taken upon the two reports, what percentage of 
the Nation would support the one submitted by Benham and Earn- 
say? Would it be more than 3 per cent, or even so much? 

The court unites to recommend : "In view of the length of time 
which has elapsed since the occurrence of the events of the Santi- 
ago campaign, the court recommends no further proeedings be had 
in the premises." 

And thus would the matter drop but it will not drop. Con- 
gress and the States will be asked to take it up. It will get into 
politics, and an interminable discussion will follow. 

France has her Dreyfus, England her BuUer, and we have our 
Schley — and our Sampson. 

1)onc$ty d$ a l)an(llcap. 

Absolute honesty there is not, but there are degrees. Perhaps 
the fine sense of honor that sometimes goes with the New England 
conscience is the nearest approach, but this is approximation only, 
like the greatest degree of artificial cold remote from the absolute 
zero. The old-fashioned honesty of the word-as-good-as the bond 
sort began to go out with the coming in of agnosticism. The tide 
has noti yet set the other way, as sometimes follows when the trans- 
ition stage is complete. But Avhat does the world offer to that 
robust sort of honesty, not altogether uncommon a generation ago, 
which still survives as an hereditary impulse in the occasional in- 
dividual ? ' ' 

t 

Polities has degenerated into a game in which bribery, broken 
pledges, bad faith, are often the trinity of success. Business is a 



78 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

gamble in which the Golden Rule, if it ever existed, has become 
obsolete. An intellectual charlatanism has marked every pro- 
fession. Brains, coupled with honesty, are not the surest indices 
for the future. 

There is a curious problem for the student of ethics. Though 
common honesty is at a lower place to-day than it held fifty years 
ago, human sympathy has a quicker, more responsive vibration. 
All of which is very abstract, and not much to the point. 

Does the honest man ever question himself if the self-imposed 
handicap, borne voluntarily for a term of years, has not seriously 
crippled him in life's struggles, just as the devout sometimes feel 
the doubt of a personal hereafter, and of the whole scheme of re- 
ward and retribution promised in another world ? If he does not, 
then honesty and stupidity are identical terms. Of course, no 
man of the better sort would commit a burglary, or pick the pocket 
of friend or stranger; but how often have you lent a four-bit piece 
or a dollar or any other small sum to friends of this very sort, who 
have forgotten to return it. It isn't the loss of the loan tliat wor- 
ries, for the honest man isn't penurious, though he often gets the 
credit of being so; it's the loss of confidence in the integrity of 
friends in small things. The same friend who may not be honest 
enough to return what he has borrowed, though he is too honest 
for dowTiright theft, spends several times the amount in your 
company, providing he can make a good display of keeping his end 
up. He doesn't worry over your loans which he hasn't paid. It's 
the honest man who does the worrying under the blow to good 
will. The honest man is handicapped by the pettiness of it all, 
and yet if he will think it over he will find that nine out of his ten 
friends who borrow never do repay. 

That is the trivial handicap of the honest man with his friends. 
In the world of business, in politics, in the professions, he is a 
lamb with the wolf pack all al)out him. Does any sane man ex- 
pect that the rest of the world will not get the better of him if it 
can ? If he does, he belongs in the cloister. 

Honesty means something more than refraining from theft. 



RAGTIME. 79 

robber}^ or burglary. How many honest men are there who have 
never failed to remind the street car conductor that he has for- 
gotten to collect their fares? How many honest men are there 
who, having been victimized with a l^ogus or mutilated coin, never 
passed it along to the next fellow who looked as if he would be 
stupid enough not to detect the imposition? If the honest man 
will do this, and he does, when he carries along with him some 
high ideals of debt-paying, fair dealing, ought he to be surprised 
if the rest of the world, which may be a very good sort of a world, 
charitable in its way, has a lower standard, which handicaps him 
seriously ? To the business world commercial success is the motto, 
and the successful man, who wouldn't do anything indictable, but 
is merely shrewd, is not bothered with questions concerning his 
success. The rest are too busy trying to imitate him or wrest 
away from him a portion of what he has. What business man is 
smitten with conscience pains concerning his own honesty, if hi« 
success is marked by the failure of a rival? 

And the professions — the law? In what city in America is it 
difficult for a criminal with ready money to pick from the best 
of the bar, men, who will defend him for a share of the proceeds 
of his crime? What criminal finds it hard to obtain attorneys of 
reputable standing in court and community who will seek not to 
obtain absolute justice for their client, not to guard him that no 
injustice be done him? Are there not those who for money will 
use every subterfuge, every trick, every technicality which the in- 
volved legal machinery conceals to free him, of whose guilt they 
are consciouhs from the just punishment they know he deserves? 

And medicine — Do the physicians live up to the letter of the 
law? Too many court cases show that it is not uncommon for 
them to violate some of the statutes, and the percentage of cases 
which does not reach the courts is not supposed to be a small one. 

And the ministry — The call to save souls at a higher salary in 
a more fashionable church does not go a-begging. 

And the courts — Are judgments never shaped by a brain keenly 
conscious that a political future may be involved? 



80 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

All of the foregoing has to do with honesty in its way. There 
are not many men, perhaps, who do not throw aside some of the 
ideals of the schools when they get out into the practical iield of 
life. As for the man who insists on carrying his handicap through 
it all, pity the overburdened fool if you will. Perhaps he deserves 
your pity, and perhaps he doesn't. He may be a crank in twen- 
tieth century days, and then again it may be that his own self- 
respect is more to him than success. It's a question of value, af- 
ter all, but the values are so different that honesty and success 
may no more be compared than the poet and the prize fighter. 

Tn the matter of Obligations. 

No man is so mean that he hasn^t a friend, and none so great 
that he doesn't need one. Herein lies the weight of obligation. 
It is the beginning of goodwill, goes along with it and sometimes 
kills it. To be under the stress of favors received may be a seri- 
ous handicap of itself. In the struggle to repay favors there is 
danger of overdoing, coupled with the feeling of neglect on one 
side or the other, which may be very trivial, but just as real. Af- 
ter all obligations grow less with time, and, like an old debt, are 
finally outlawed. You want to get judgment within the statutory 
period or the limitation will stand against you. Therein the obli- 
gation and the injury differ, for unless you are of the sort that 
patiently turns the other cheek the sense of injury finds a good 
growth, healthy or morbid, as you will. 

But when obligation and wrong demand their recompense from 
the same source, it's hard to decide whether to act the part of 
Christian or Indian. To make the measure full for both isn't so 
easy as it seems. 

As a friend of mine puts it: "When a friend has done you a 
good turn and you have tried to meet the full measure of the ob- 
ligation, with principal, at least, if not with interest, it's apt to 
stun you wdien that friend suddenly smashes you squarely between 
the eyes." It wasn't a physical blow to which he referred. That 



RAGTIME. 81 

reference was for the force of comparison. It was to find ap- 
parent expression of ill-will, where from long association and ex- 
perience he had expected the reverse. Perhaps he was at fault 
as a diagnostician. Motives sometimes are misunderstood. They 
are not always good cadavers, ready for the dissecting knife. This 
coupling of obligation and wrong is like driving confidence and 
distrust in a double team. They go better in sequence and should 
be hitched up tandem. Even then if the driver isn't skillful, 
there is apt to be a mishap. After all, the matter of obligation 
is as you view it, and your own point of view can never be the 
exact point of view for someone else. But if the obligation ex- 
ists with a good offset in the way of recognition, what more need 
be asked? Points of view may shift for themselves. 

Brute Brawn and Brute Brain* 

Isn't there an analogy somewhere between the -barons who took 
by force of arms and the kings of finance who take by strength of 
intellect? Brute brawn and brute brain, wherein do they differ 
except in the method of bringing about the same result? After 
all, to the loser, what does it matter whether he yielded to the 
force which the baron brought against him, gave up at the point 
of the pistol to the highwayman or surrendered to a combine of 
wealth? The baron has stopped his depredations; the calling of 
the highwayman has ceased to be a respectable one, but the man 
with the financial convolution dominant in his brain persists. If 
it is wrong morally and legally to take by brute force from one 
who is unable to protect himself, should not the application lie 
both in ethics and in law for the mentally strong who take from 
what to them are pigmies in intellect? 

In earlier days it was the custom to speak of one who excelled as 
having a gift in that particular line in which he was above his 
fellows, which wasn't so very far wrong, after all. Educate musi- 
cally thousands of young women, and perhaps among the number 
one may be found a worthy successor to Patti. With the best that 



82 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

military and naval schools can do you may develop a gi'eat general 
or a great admiral, and then again you may not. Turn your 
young men loose in the business field, and the man in whose brain 
there is an excess of cells or cell energy, or whatever it may be 
that has to do with finance, will outstrip his companions, and strip 
them, too, of what they possess. The average man has no more 
chance against the man who is "gifted" with the overdevelopment 
of the financial convolutions than has the average man against 
one having such a muscular development as Jeffries. But, as the 
most of us are just average, physically, mentalh^, if we don't ac- 
tually fall below the line of averages, why shouldn't we combine 
against our keener fellows? Isn't the problem of socialism to 
reduce us all to a common level, or elevate us to the dead line of 
averages, as the case may be? The combination of the mentally 
mediocre against the keener brained ought to be about as produc- 
tive of results as the union of the weaker to resist the aggressions 
of the stronger.' 

Of m Use of a mora. 

Eichard Grant White and the lesser purists, who have followed 
his work with works of their own, have told much of words and 
their uses, and, like all partisans, have been extremists. They 
stickle for niceties, which do not exist. They would have English 
grow by rules of their own making, and prune the language un- 
til it became as round and artificial as a Monterey cypress, trimmed 
to the fancy of a mathematical gardener. Yet English persists in 
evolving in its own peculiar and irregular way, of which the word 
"electrocution" is a sample. It is a natural child, bom of a union 
which etymologists do not sanction. The attempt was made to 
strangle it in its infancy, but its resistant vitality was too great 
for it to be put out of the way in such a manner. It is here to 
stay. To those who know, and in these days of word-analysis 
many who read do know, the word strikes the ear with something 
like the harsh force of a discord in music, yet it is not misleading. 



RAGTIME. 83 

Everyone knows exactly the meaning intended in its nse^, and to 
those who do not know its origin it is a very fine word indeed. 
After all, what matters it if it is a successful upstart? We do 
not like that sort to he successful, but etymologist and sociologist 
will find in their own spheres, words and people, that success comes 
to that very kind. 

A word that would suggest death caused by electricity, more es- 
pecially when inflicted as a punishment for crime, has long been 
the subject of search. It seems strange that the simplest and 
easiest term has been overlooked, and that by the mere grammati- 
cal conversion of a noun to a verb. 

Volt is terse. It tells you with the clearness of an Anglo-Saxon 
word its meaning, though of Mediterranean origin. Why 
shouldn't Czolgosz have been volted instead of electrocuted? It's 
a good coinage, as good as if it came from the mint of slang. 
It's short, and it rhymes, and the jingling paraphapher can couple 
it with jolt and dolt, and, in case of necessity, even set it off against 
halt. Then there are moult and bolt, and colt, and "toldt," 
which might be tolerated in dialect. There is a sort of free and 
easy onomatopoeia about it, like Homer's argurioio bioio, yet we 
shall continue to have electrocute and electrocution, degenerating 
perhaps in time to ^cute' and '^cution,' like telephone to 'phone, 
and volt will probably go to the limbo of words that might have 
been. | 

tyncb Caw, tbe Great Jftncrlcan RefcrenaMiw. 

For those of us who refuse to take our creeds from the priests, is 
not the logical sequence a refusal to accept the ethics of our law- 
givers? Does not one follow the other just as liberalism grows 
into agnosticism? 

But the moralists say this is the false step over the precipice 
into anarchy. Is it? If it is, anarchy should have been the se- 
quel to the Reformation ; anarchy should have been the outgrowth 
of the American Revolution. 



84 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

The Boston Tea Party was the first application of the great 
American Referendum. It was a lynch law, but without the rope, 
the bullet or the fagot. The vigilantes of San Francisco appealed 
to lynch law in its forcible form, sentenced to death, and enforced 
the penalty. In neither instance is there condemnation, and neith- 
er led to anarchy. The latter, in fact, conserved the peace and 
good order of this city. 

When laws fail of enforcement, when laws are manifestly inad,- 
equate, the people make a law for themselves. If the codes and 
the Constitution do not satisfy our ideas of justice, if they do not 
permit the speedy punishment for wrong-doing, if they fail in 
many instances, as they do, in fact, in most, should there be no re- 
course? When the courts free the unquestionably guilty through 
technicalities, should the courts complain that their impotence 
causes a democratic people to resort to a referendum in which quib- 
bles do not save, but swift punishment is meted out to the do^r 
of evil? 

When the libertine meets death at the hands of one man, the 
jury acquits and the community approves. When his brutish 
prototype is hunted down by the neighbors and killed, the senti- 
mentalists are horror-stricken. That is a strange sort of con- 
sistency. 

Ought lynch law, wisely administered, to be condemned? 
Should it not be judged by the same standard as the codes? In 
one instance it comes directly from the people, in the other 
through a legislative intermediary. Why should not a liigher 
criticism be applied to the codes? Laws are made by men, and 
not always by good men. Many statutes are on our books be- 
cause they were put there to serve the special purposes of the law- 
yers who fathered them in the legislatures. If they work ill 
should they be above censure, and if they fail of right, must wrong 
be patiently borne out of a superstitious reverence for man-made 
shalls and shall nots? 



Poets of CO'Day, Vest eraay and tu Day Before, 



To-day ought to be one of honest thought, sincerely expressed, 
though it may be one rather of charlatanism, as yesterday was 
marked by a hypercritical straining after the effect of simplicity, 
on the one hand, or by the affectation of elegance on the other, 
and the day before was given over to a sort of reverential ignor- 
ance. Science has opened the way to criticism, and nothing is 
so sacred in literature that it is spared from the knife. 

There was a time when the Big Four of English v^rse were apr 
proached by a kow-towing world. Is it literary blasphemy to- 
day to find commonplace rhymes in Chaucer, stilted prettiness in 
Spenser, pompous platitudes in Milton, and mock heroics in 
Shakespeare? Is it lese majestic to point to the bubbles of pre- 
tense? Is the following from Chaucer poetry? "A knight there 
was, and that a worthy man, that fro the time that he first began 
to riden out he loved chevalrie, trouthe, and honour, fredom and 
curtesie." And Spenser has given this : "Upon a great adventure 
he was bound, that greatest Gloriana to him gave (that greatest 
glorious queene of Faery lond), to win him worship, and her 
grace to have.^^ And Milton wrote these lines in seriousness: 
"This way the noise was, if mine ear be true, my best guide now; 
methought it was the sound of riot and ill-managed merriment." 
From "When Icicles Hang by the WalF' these words of Shake^ 
speare are taken: "Then nightly sings the staring owl, to-who, 
to-whit, to-who, a merry note, while greasy Joan doth keel the 
pot." They are worthy of the Lake School. 

To-day there are writers of good verse. Markham wrote a poem 
when he gave to the public "The Man With the Hoe." Cast in 
another mold it would have been an epic. Joaquin Miller has 
written a few real poems and more rubbish. In "The Days of 
Old" he wrote the lyric of ^49. Holmes has given us humor 



86 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

without the sting, something the earlier writers were nnable to 
do. We langh with him, even when conscious that he rhymes ouj 
own foibles. His humor is kindly. Better irony and stronger 
sarcasm may be found in the writers of to-day than Pope or By^- 
ron ever wrote. The Nineteenth Century failed and the Twenti- 
eth does not promise a great epic or a first-class drama. The age 
is not one which d\3lights in long, great, but tiresome poems. 

" And now she's at the doctor's door, 
She lifts the knocker, rap, rap, rap; 
The doctor at the casement shows 
His glimmering eyes that peep and doze! 
And one hand rubs his old nightcap." 

The foregoing lines were given to the world as poetry by one 
of the verse-writers whom England and English-speaking people 
have called and still consider a great poet. He has been termed 
the great master of the Lake School, of which Collier has written : 
"Bending a reverent ear to the mysterious harmonies of nature, to 
the ceaseless song of praise that rises from every blade of grass 
and every dewdrop, warbles in the fluting of every lark and sweeps 
to heaven in every wave of air, they found in their own deep 
hearts a musical echo of that song, and shaping into words the 
swelling of their inward faith, they spoke to the world in a way to 
which the world was little used about things in which the world 
saw no poetic beauty.^^ 

A man may be educated to believe in the false as well as the 
true, but it is an extreme case when anyone can see poetry in the 
ihymed lines of Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy.'' They are as bare of 
beauty ais a mud flat from which the tide has receded. 

Wordsworth often gets into the shallows of verse, where he 
flounders in a ridiculous way in his straining after simplicity. If 
poetry be one of the fine arts and if the beautiful in its widest ac- 
ceptation be synonymous with art, then W^ordsworth has written 
much which is not poetry, though accepted as such. And, yet, oc- 
casionally, he struck the simple chord with the stroke of a mas- 
ter. 



POETS OF TO-DAY, YESTERDAY, AND THE DAY BEFORE. 



87 



" A primrose by the river's brim, 
A yellow primrose was to him, 
And it was nothing more." 

In those three lines Wordsworth wrote poetry. There is poetry 

in these: 

" I have seen 
A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract 
Of inland ground, applying to his ear 
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell. 
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul 
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon 
Brightened with joy; for murmuring from within 
AVere heard sonorous cadences, whereby 
To his belief, the monitor expressed 
Mysterious union with its native sea; 
Evenl such a shell the universe itself 
Is to the ear of Faith." 

In his "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early 
Childhood" Wordsworth wrote one of the greatest odes in the 
English or any language, yet he also wrote "The Excursion/' 
which, though it contains some fine passages, is a most tiresome 
thing to read, and he wrote "The Blind Highland Boy," which, if 
sent to any publication to-day, would be rejected as puerile. 

Wordsworth does his best when he drops simplicity. He is 
not the equal of James Whitcomb Riley in dealing with the poetr;; 
of common life. Writers of to-day would hardly give the follow 
ing to the world: 

"Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray; 
And when I cross'd the Avild, 
I chanced to see at break of day 
The solitary child." 



rv 



Or this: 



Beneath the moon that shines so bright. 
Till she is tired, let Betty Foy 

With girth and stirrup fiddle-faddle; 

But Avherefore set upon a saddlel 
Him whom she loves, her Idiot Boy." 



88 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

Yet the foregoing are but a few lines of the vast mass of in- 
xnities of verse written by the man whom England made a poet 
laureate. 

• • • 

Shakespeare has been so long worshiped as the literary god that 
the criticism of an ordinary man, if it be honest, will be regarded 
as sacrilege. Where he makes grammatical blunders, and he 
makes as many as some of the writers for the press, he is so great 
that he is above the rule. When his chronolog}^ is out of date and 
his facts fail to conform to history, he is greater than truth. If 
his verse doesn't scan — and oftentimes it doesn't — it is the fault 
of the student for having discovered the fact. Things which ap- 
pear commonplace are not so. They seem so because his writ- 
ings are so deep that there can be no shallows. All that remains 
to do is to wrench from them some meaning that was never in- 
tended. If his wTitings are not natural, it is because he is greater 
than nature, and nature is in him. Of another writer rl: has been 
said that he made his little fishes talk like whales. The literary 
authorities have made mammoths from some of Shakespeare's 
pigmies. Shakespeare makes Antonio say: 

" In sooth, I know not why I am so sad; 
It wearies me; you say it wearies you; 
But how I cauglit it, found it or came by it, 
What stuff 'tis made of, whereof it is born, 
I am to learn; 

And such a want-wit sadness ma Ives of me. 
That I have much ado to know myself." 

The opening lines of the "Merchant of Venice" make strange 
contrast with these from Lear: 

" I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness, 
I never gave you kingdom, called you children!" 

Or with what has been termed the perfect example: 

" How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! 
Here will we sit and let the| sounds of music 
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night ; 



POETS OF TO-DAY, YESTERDAY, AND THE DAY BEFORE. 89 

Become the touches of sweet harmony. 
Sit, Jessica; loolc how the floor of heaven 
Is thick inhiid with patines of bright gold; 
There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest 
But in his motion lilie an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim." 

If Mr. Antonio were living to-day he would have said that he 
was hliie as the devil, if he didn't use stronger words, and his 
doctor wonld have told him that his liver was out of order, and 
prescribed calomel. In his own day and in his own language he 
would have used similar words, and wouldnH have mouthed a lot 
of nonsense. The chasm between the heroic and that which is 
not is not so wide but that Shakespeare has been able to jump 
it frequently. Antonio's blues caught him on the wrong side of 
the canyon. 

The literary highwayman of his time, he took where and what 
he wanted, but, like the king, he could do no wrong. 

• • • 
Burns wrote a sermon in verse, the concluding lines of which 
are : i 

" O wad some power the giftie gie iTs' 
To see oursel's as ithers see us!' 
It wad frae monie a blunder free us. 

And foolish notion:. 
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us 
And ev'n devotion." 

His text was an animated one. The title of his poem is "To 
a louse, on seeing one on a lady's bonnet at church.'' The subject 
is one which does not incline to poetry, but Burns made a poem' 
in his last verse. 

He was not so successful when he wrote : 

" My curse upon thy venomed stang 
That shoots my tortured gums alang; 
An' through my lugs gies mony a twang, 

With gnawing vengeance! 
Tearing my nerves wi' bitter pang 
Like racking engines." 



90 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

The lines are as uncouth as his subject is unfit. He tried to 
extract poetry and made a complete failure. The closing simile 
is as false as the rhyme. Yet the same author wrote : 

"Alas! it's no thy neibor sweet, 

The bonie lark, companion meet, 
Bending thee 'mang the clewT weet, 
,Wi' spreclieled breast. 
When upw^^rd-springing, blithe to greet 
The purpling East!" 

And he also wrote: 

" John Anderson, my jo, John, 

When we were first acquent, 
Your locks were like the raven. 

Your bonnie broW| was brent; 
But now your brow is beld, John, 

Your locks are like the snow; 
But blessings on your frosty pow, 

John Anderson, my jo. 

" John Anderson, my jo, John, 

We clamb the hill thegither; 
And monid a canty day, John, 

We've had with ane anither. 
Now w^e maun totter down, John, 

But hand in hand w^e'll go 
And sleep thegither at the foot, 

John Anderson, my jo." 

In "John Anderson, My Jo/' Burns wrote a poem where Words- 
■worth would have written something as silly as "The Idiot Boy." 



Kipling's muse is the modern one. His verse is virile and his 
lines are realistic. His stanzas are not polished between Latin 
diction and classic allusion into the weak smoothness, character- 
istic of an earlier day. Contrast him with the effeminate Poe. 
Poe was neurotic and alcohol was a poison to his nerves. The 



POETS OF TO DAY, YESTERDAY, AND THE DAY BEFORE, 



91 



men of the barracks, whom Kipling has immortalized had strong 
stomachs, possessed the good and the had traits of the average 
man. There is nothing of the abnormal in his verse, as there is 
in everything which Poe wrote. He is always sane. 

Despise his churlishness as one may, and those who met him in 
San Francisco, and knew him best here found him lacking in the 
ordinary courtesies of life, we must all acknowledge that Kipling 
can write. He has his mannerisms, chief of which is the misplaced 
also, that he drags forward wdierever he can to the beginning of 
a sentence, and he has written poor verse and worse stories, be- 
cause there was money in anything he submitted to the publishers, 
but he can write, and has written. "The Taking of Lungtung- 
pen,'' though not in verse, is worth a dozen volumes of a dozen 
English writers of the earlier half of the last century, whom ihe 
critics have placed well up on the ladder of fame. 

Incidentally, a good story is told of Kipling's visit to San Fran- 
cisco in the latter eighties. His fame was just beginnius: then, 
and he submitted some of his stories to the Sunday Editor of 
the Examiner, who returned them with the remark that they were 
not up to Examiner standard. 

Kipling has fonnd and written the poetry of the common place 
which Wordsworth sought and thought he found, only to give us 
puerilities. There are the same strong cadences to his verse which 
Sousa in another way has struck in tones. 

The poetry of the barracks is here: 

" Snip me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is lilce the worst, 
Where there aren't uo Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a 
thirst; ^ 

For the temple-bells are callin' and it's there that I would be— 
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at tTie sea; 

On the road to Mandalay, 

Where the old flotilla lay, 
With our sick beneath the awnings w^hen we went to Mandalay! 

Oh, the road to Mandalay, 

Where the flying-tishes play. 
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China, crost the bay!" 



92 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

In liis "Islanders'^ Kipling has set the British Empire by the 
ears with his "Flanneled fools at the wicket, or the muddled oafs 
at the goals/' but an Australian, not so well known, W. Monro 
Anderson, strikes back in Kipling's own measure, and he strikes 
hard : i 

"Lord of the loud-linigecl legions! 
Prince of thei Purple Press! 
Are we but pigmy people 
Lost in the wilderness, 
That we of the Younger Nations 
Should call back our fighting men 
At the blast of your tin war-trumpet, 
Or the scrawl of your scathing penV 
Safe in your inky dugout, 
Flinging your gibes about, 
What do you know of England 
Or the quest that brought us out?- 
We of the Younger Nations, 
Reared on the range and plain, 
Scornful out of battle, 
Hurl you the' lie again. 
We of the Younger Nations, 
Are we but sickly spawn- 
Spoilt little lambs of the Empire 
On whom the elders fawn? 
Willing and freely we sought it 
Out of the range and the plain, 
Freely, unbridled, undriven, 
As we would seek it again. 
Lord of the loud-lunged legions! 
Scribe of a jaundiced age! 
We of the Younger Nations 
Were taught from a brighter page- 
Have read of the old-time leaders 
How their stirring deeds were done, 
How on the fields of Eton 
The great war-games were won. 
So when the war-worn horseman 
Comes to his own again. 



POETS OF TO DAY, YESTERDAY, AND THE DAY BEFORE. 93 

Back to the fen and moorland, 
Back to the rolling plain, 
Grudge him not gun nor hnnter, 
The hound nor the well-kept turf, 
Bidding him strut the pavement 
Like some war-belted serf- 
Bidding him rule the people 
By aping the foreign cur 
Whose marketplace is silenced 
By the clink of the bully's spur." 



Why Coleridge and Soiitbey--especially Coleridge— should be 
always grouped with Wordsworth is something of a literary mys- 
tery. The three are always classified as belonging to the Lake 
School. Geographically they do, but .something more tangible than 
location is meant by the Lake Scliool. Its leader carried the doc- 
trine of simplicity to the ridicnlons. Wordsworth is the literary 
puritan. Coleridge's temperament and works are of another sort. 
Coleridge and Edgar Allen Poe would make a better pair. Both 
are the apostles of delirium, one of drugs, the other of drink, and 
their literary insanities are not few. Both wrote poetry, which 
will probably live — at least for many decades. Perhaps the two 
poems by which Coleridge is m.ost popularly known are the "Eime 
of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan.'' 

" In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 
A stately pleasure-dome decree, 
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 
Through caverns measureless to man, 
Down to a sunless sea. ; 

" So twice five miles of fertile ground! 
With walls and tow^ers were girdled round; 
And there were gardens, bright with sinuous rills, 
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; 
And here were forests ancient as the hills, 
Infolding sunny si^ots of greenery." 



94 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

Coleridge thus tells how he came to write Kiibla Khan, from 
which the foregoing lines are quoted: 

"In the frummer of the year 1797 the author, then in ill-health, 
had retired to a lonely farm-house, between Porlock and Linton, 
on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In conse- 
quence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, 
from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment 
he was reading the following sentence or words of the same sub-, 
stance in Turchas' Pilgrimage': ^Here the Khan Kubla com- 
manded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto; and 
thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The 
author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at 
least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid 
confidence that he could not have composed less than from two 
to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition 
in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a par- 
allel production of the correspondent expressions without any sen- 
sation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to 
himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and, taking 
his pen, ink and paper instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines 
that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately 
called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by 
him about an hour, and on his return to his room found, to his no 
small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained 
some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vis- 
ion, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines 
and images, all the rest had passed away, like the images on the 
surface of a stream, into which a stone had been cast, but, alas ! 
without the after restoration of the latter." 

Coleridge was a drug fiend and in the language of to-day Kubla 
Khan is a pipe-dream. In his day a euphuism was used to de- 
scribe his weakness, 

A rather pleasing bit of alliteration, though it violates the rules, 
is introduced by Coleridge in his "Eime of the Ancient Mariner/' 
where he writes: 



?OETS OF TO-DAY, YESTERDAY, AND THE DAY BEEoHE. 05 

" The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, 
The furrow followed free; 
We were the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea." , ' 

But the whiff of opium is apparent in the poem. 



" He that has light within his own clear breast 
May sit in the center and enjoy bright day; 
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts 
Benighted walks under the midday sun." 

The preceding lines were not written by Martin Farquhar Tup- 
per, though they might well have been, but by John Milton, the 
greatest epic poet since Homer, if not the equal of the author (or 
is it authors?) of the "Iliad.'' 

These lines are not worthy of him who wrote : 

" Thus with the year 
Seasons return, but not to me returns 
Day or the sweet approach of even or morn, 
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose. 
Or flocks or herds or human face divine; 
But cloud, instead, and ever-during dark. 
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men 
Cut off, anil for the book of knowledge fair 
Presented with a universal blank 
Of nature's works, to me expunged and rased, 
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out." 

In the foregoing "Invocation to Light" from "Paradise Lost," 
Milton made the most touching reference to his own infinnity, 
and in the opening to "II Penseroso" he wrote something destined 
to live: 

" Hence, vain deluding joys, 

The brood of Folly, without father bred! 
How little you bestead. 
Or fill the fixed mind with all your toys! 
Dwell in some idle brain, 



96 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY, 

And fancies form, with gaudy shapes possess, 
As thick and numberless 
As the gay motes that people sunbeams — 
Or likest hovering dreams, 
The fickle pensioners of Morpheus' train." 

There is something heyond what Shakespeare wrote in describ- 
ing iVntonio's blues. In "II Penseroso" Milton made poetry. In 
the opening lines of the "Merchant of Venice" Shakespeare wrote 
bombast. ' 



Poe's poems and his poetical prose are often the mere night- 
mares of drunkenness clothed in eloquence. His ideas are vague, 
weird to the point of insanity, but he had the trick of language 
and turned his phrases with style. Many of his verses will not 
bear analysis. 
" Open then I flung the shutter, when with many a flirt and flutter, 

In there stepped a stately raven of the" saintly days of yore. 

Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he; 

But with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door,— 

Perched upon a bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door,— 

Perched and sat, and nothing more. 

" Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling. 
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, 
'Though thy crest be shorn and shaven thou,' I said, 'art sure no 

craven; 
Ghastly, grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore. 
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the night's Plutonian shore V 
Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.' 



) 5J 



Now there is a melodious jingle to "The Eaven'' which pleases, 
but why should he have been stately and why should he be ex 
peeted to make obeisance ? Except for the alliteration, why should 
Poe have used "stopped or stayed he"? A raven with crest 
"shorn and shaven," which had the mien of lord or lady, Poe 
wasn't sure which, beguiled his sad fancy. In order to get a 
rhyme he dragged in the words "thou, art sure no craven." 



POETS OF TO-DAY, YESTERDAY AND THE DAY BEFORE. 97 

The poem fits the measure. It rhymes correctly. Otherwise 
it is the delirium tremens of verse. Where another man might 
have seen blue parrots or snakes Poe saw the raven. It is really 
a jag done into poetry. Most men would not be able to put a jag 
into such melodious verse, and most men would not care to do so. 



His literary form is the most nearly perfect of any modern 
maker of English verse, yet Tennyson has written some things 
which are not poetry, and he has given to the world lines so silly 
that a mediocre man would be ashamed to acknowledge them as 
his own. There is poetry in these: 

" The women sang 
Between the rougher voices of the men 
Like linnets in the pauses of the wind." 

And there is such silliness in his "Airy Fairy Lillian" that it 
is not worth the space of quotation. 
' The following lines were written to order: 

" Till each man finds his own in all men's good, 

And all men work in noble brotherhood, 

Breaking their mailed fleet and armed towers, 

And ruling by obeying Nature's powers, 

And gathering all her fruits of peace and crowned with all herflow^ers." 

Such lines are not worthy of the man who flayed Bulwer Lytton 
with his sti'ong verse on "The New Timon.^' They are not worthy 
of him who wrote "In Memoriam/' though they might do for 
England's present poet laureate. They do not fit with 

" Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of 
change." 

Or with ! 

" Love tooiv up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might: 
Smote the chord of self, that trembling, passed in music out of sight." 



98 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

With all the care which the New England three took, Longfel- 
low, Whittier and Bryant sometimes fall below the average. Rhe- 
torical errors are not infrequent. Bryant wrote a poem in his 
lines "To a Waterfowl,^^ yet there is a false figure in the first 
stanza : 

" Whither, midst falling dew, 
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day. 
Far, through the rosy depths dost thou pursue 

Thy solitary way?" 

Steps should not glow, but in spite of this fault there is a wealth 
of imagery about the poem which appeals: 

"All day thy wings have fanned 
At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere. 
Yet stoop not, weary to the welcome land. 

Though the dark night is near." 

The verse is spoiled in a way by "Yet stoop not." Does he 
mean the wings or the bird? Is it a grammatical blunder or a 
strained application of the verb stoop as a predicate to wings ? But 
he wrote: 

"A mighty hand from an exhaustless urn 
Pours forth the never-ending flood of years 
Among the nations." 



fraternity of tbe frontier. 



It was the fraternity of the frontier that made Tom Welsh and 
Dandy guests at our adobe in North Clifton. The adobe stood on 
a shelf which Nature at some forgotten time had quarried from the 
wall of rock that rose back of the sandbar upon which the northern 
half of the camp straggled. Before it was the flume, carrying 
power for the copper concentrator and dripping stagnant pools 
wherein the summer bred malaria. 

In Welsh and Dandy the psychologist would have had a study. 
Because we were of the frontier, and not given to the analysis of 
the subjective or the weighing of emotions, that field for inquiry 
has been lost. 

One December day, Stevens and I had joined with Welsh, Ean- 
dall, Montgomery and Benton to celebrate Christmas. It was the 
free-and-easy acquaintanceship of the territories where the dress 
suit is unknown, and where men may lead the life without the con- 
ventional lie, which older communities find as necessary as gar- 
ment and food. In Arizona the lie was made to serve a strongei^ 
purpose than the concealment of social pettinesses. There the lie 
of egotism was permissible; that of malice dangerous; the political 
untruth something at times to be admired or feared; the cowardly 
lie an entity below that of malice, with a despicability all its own, 
and the social lie as unknown as the city weakling who makes use 
of it. So if lies were swapped at that dinner they were of the 
strenuous sort, befitting the outdoor life of cattleman, prospector, 
or man of any sort who loved sun and weather, believed in the 
potentiality of the desert, whether what he was seeking was wealth, 
health or adventure. 

So over turkey and mescal (and the turkey had been wild and 
was good) there came the exchange of anecdote and talkative little 



LofC. 



100 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

boosts of individual futures, which, if we could have foreseen, 
might have been omitted. And when there was neither mescal 
nor turkey, except the bones of the bird, upon which Dandy was 
still crunching, Benton and Kandall and Montgomery and Welsh 
saddled their mules and struck the trail. Their way lay together. 
Benton was an old rancher, the pioneer of the Blue, and the others 
were on a trip to locate some miles above, where, with abundance of 
water and grass, they expected the multiplication of a few head of 
cattle to bring them easy wealth. 

The next May, with twenty-odd others, Stevens and I struck the 
saine trail up the San Francisco, took the short cut to the junction 
of the Blue, and rode up that stream to give burial to old man 
Benton, whom the Apaches had slain ten or more days before, leav- 
ing .his corpse to lie on the open ground in front of his cabin. 

When we returned on the evening of the second day following. 
Dandy, with a strange lack of canine judgment, due, perhaps, to 
his mongrel ancestry, disputed with Stevens and me the right of 
admission to our own adobe. It was by stratagem that we entered 
to find Welsh in possession, lying groaning on a cot, feverish, with 
a two weeks' old bullet wound. 

I. 

It was a nerve-racking experience which Tom Welsh had under- 
gone. It was from this, rather than from the bullet, that he suf- 
fered mostly, though the wound was an ugly one. Both master 
and dog were shaken, and for weeks they enacted the horrible night- 
mare of it all, and once a tragedy was averted by the merest chance. 
Psychologists now say man has a subjective mind in addition to 
other mental faculties, which possesses an infallible memory. If 
it be true, then the brutes must have something akin to this form of 
cerebration. 

Welsh and Dandy turned somnambulists. Each was possessed 
of the same terror and acted jointly under its influence. That was 



FRATERNITY OF THE FRONTIER. 101 

why it became dangerous for the Mexicans to bathe in the flume 
which ran before our door, and how it came about that Stevens 
saved the life of one whose life, in the light of subsequent events, 
might as well have been sacrificed then. As it was, the brother-in- 
law of Pablo Salcido owed his life to Stevens. Two weeks later 
this same Mexican murdered John McCormick, the most popular 
barkeeper in Graham county, and fled across the line into Old Mex- 
ico, where he may be to this day, for all I know. 

But the Mexicans suddenly ceased to bathe in the flume after 
that June night, when Tom Welsh drew a bead on the black head 
of Juan Alvarez. The flume carried four feet of water, and the 
fall was sufficient to give a good current. So the Mexican popula- 
tion of Clifton, old and young, used it as a public bath. They 
would gather a half mile above, just beyond the last house, where 
a flat rock served them as a convenient dressing-room, and float 
down with the current. Then they would race back along the 
single plank which the flume-walker used for his daily trip of in- 
spection, and repeat the voyage and the bath ; such of them as did 
not trip on an occasional loose board and tumble into the water, 
much to the delight of their companions, which found a childish 
expression in the shrill laughter of the women, and the hoarser 
comment of the men, always profane, following a peculiarity of 
Spanish speech. After all, the bathing was good for them, and 
what was said in that dialect which takes the place of Castilian on 
the North American continent was not considered. 

Whether it was the subjective mind of the man or of the dog 
which first received the suggestion only a ps3^chologist might say, 
and none was there. So the fact may never be established. The 
theory is one of hazard and not of scientific value, perhaps, but is 
offered for want of a better one, and is this: The strain of Indian 
blood is not weak in the Mexicans of the frontier, and Dandy may 
have scented it in his somnambulism, confused the possessors with 
Apaches, and by some strange telepathic method impressed the 
subjective mind of his master with the delusion. 



J02 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

Whatever may be the truth, one June night Tom Welsh arose 
from his cot, took his carbine, seated himself in the doorway and 
waited. Dandy crouched beside him. Stevens was aroused by the 
low growl of tha dog to see Welsh taking aim at an object in the 
flume, and shouted. Welsh was almost a perfect shot, but the 
shout destroyed his aim, awakened the objective mind, it may be, 
and the bullet went an inch from the head of Juan Alvarez instead 
of perforating it. Stevens' shout had been a loud one, and what- 
ever may havd been the confused relationship of objective and sub- 
jective in the respective minds of Welsh and Dandy, each was nor- 
mally awake by this time. 

Stevens and I pacified the Mexicans as best we could. As they 
filed away on the plank walk of the flume toward the rock which 
they had improvised for a dressing room and where their clothes 
lay, no sound of laughter came back to us. They went away 
in silence. After that they selected for a bathing place a deep pool 
in the river below South Clifton, a mile or more from our abode, 
hidden by a turn of the box canyon, and, therefore, not within the 
range of Welsh's carbine. 

The incident caused some amusement, and Welsh was joked 
upon his indifferent marksmanship, at which he was a little piqued. 
It was merely sleep-walking carried to a dangerous absurdity, as 
all frontiersmen knew, due to the strain which Welsh had just 
undergone during the Apache raid, in which his partner, Mont- 
gomery, and his friend, Benton, had been killed, and in which he 
had been sorely wounded. 

Frontiersmen knew nothing of the psychological point of view, 
and if they had would have cared as little, all of which was very 
practical and better, perhaps, than any amount of theory. 

II. 

Tom Welsh was shot when the Chiricahuas made their last raid. 
In May, 1885, Geronimo and his band of cut-throats, after weeks 
of restlessness broke away from the San Carlos reservation and 



FRATERNITY OF THE FRONTIER. 103 

began the murderous foray which ended something more than a 
year later in their capture by American troops in Chihuahua and 
their banishment to Florida. Afterwards the Chiricahuas were 
removed to the Indian Territory, and are still nominally held as 
prisoners of war. Greronimo, now past 80 years of age, isi desirous 
of a full pardon, with permission to return to his old haunts in 
Arizona. 

The Chiricahua has much cunning, great cowardice, and his 
reasoning is of the most primitive sort. Because of the last-men- 
tioned fact, he made the raid of 1885. Thus he reasoned: The 
grama was more plentiful in the year 1885 than it had been for 
many seasons. This would give much feed for his ponies. The 
water holes were full, as the rainfall and the snowfall on the 
higher peaks had been heavy. This wouldi be an advantage, as he 
knew every water hole within a radius of 300 miles from the point 
of junction of New Mexico, Chihuahua and Arizona. This was 
good for traveling purposes. Besides, he had, during his term of 
quiet on the reservation since the previous outbreak of some years 
before, gathered a good supply of government cartridges, which he 
had conveniently cached where they could be of most service. 
Then, too, there was keener sport in killing a man, or, better still, 
a woman, than in shooting a deer, and less danger than in an en- 
counter with a bear. 

All this reasoning was sound, but the Chiricahua made the mis- 
take of drawing deductions which are quite beyond the primitive 
brain. He went into analogy. In the past, when he had tired out 
the troops after months of futile pursuit, and when he had become 
a trifle blase from many unpunished murders, and when the winter 
was drawing nigh, and reser^^ation rations and blankets seemed 
good, he had always found it easy to make terms with the Govern- 
ment. It had alw^ays been permitted to him to come in, promise 
to be a good Indian, and be forgiven. In fact, he was welcomed 
back to the reservation. Since this had always been the arrange- 
ment before, doubtless so it would always continue to be, and so he 
went. 



104 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

Though Clifton was a railway terminal, and had telegraphic 
facilities, it was some days after the Apaches had left the reser- 
vation before we knew of it. That delay caused the loss of some 
lives. Word first reached us, not from Government sources, but in 
a round about way. Wood Dodd, old frontiersman, wrote Stevens 
from Alma. Then the word of warning went out in every direction. 
Military red tape, or something worse, sacrificed lives that might 
have been saved had an earlier notice been permitted to go out. 

Tom Welsh sat in the doorway of his jacal one May morning. 
Montgomery, his partner, had gone out earlier to look up the burros 
which were astray. Provisions were getting low, and the two had 
decided to come into Clifton. 

Welsh first knew that something was wrong from the actions of 
Dandy. The dog crouched at his feet, hair almost bristling, and 
growled with a peculiar guttural. Welsh went inside the jacal, and 
returned with his rifle, which was a lucky precaution. He thought 
the dog had scented a bear. A moment later a shot rang out, and 
Welsh fell. With that, a score of Apaches made a rush from their 
hiding places for the cabin. Welsh raised himself, for the wound 
was not a fatal one, and began to fire on the Indians. Though they 
were twenty to one, the rush was stopped. The Apache is a coward, 
and he does not run any unnecessary risk. 

Then Welsh did a reckless thing. Wounded in' the right leg, so 
that every step was agony, he left the shelter of his jacal, and 
dodging from one tree to the next, fought the Ajiaches all day long, 
while searching for his partner, Montgomery. His hope had been 
to reach Montgomery. With his partner he felt that he could make 
a better fight, and that the two could drive off the Chiricahaus. 
He was soon convinced that Montgomery was dead, and that the 
battle was for him alone. Afterwards, it developed that the 
Apaches had caught Montgomery unarmed, and had slain him be- 
fore they made the attack on Welsh. 

One against twenty. Welsh had kept the Chiricahuas at a dis- 
tance until nearly nightfall, when, weak from loss of blood and the 



FRATERNITY OF THE FRONTIER. 105 

nervous strain, he stumbled into a ravine. He could fight no 
longer, and lay there trusting his life to concealment. Though 
Dandy was a mongrel, he reasoned then, if a dog ever did reason. 
He lay beside his master, perfectly still, while the Apaches beat the 
brush in their search for the man. Welsh in recounting his exper- 
ience afterwards, said that some of Geronimo's band came so close 
to him that he feared the loud beating of his own heart would 
betray him. Welsh lay there in the gully all that night and the 
next day. The following night he decided that it would be safe to 
move. Whether it would be so or not, he knew that his life de- 
pended upon reaching a settlement. He had bound up the wound, 
which was an ugly one, as best he could. The bullet had entered 
the fleshy part of the thigh, ranged downward, glanced around the 
knee, and had come out of the right calf. It was sorry traveling 
all the next night, and his progress was slow. Once he heard 
voices and hid. The voices died away, but he remained under 
cover for some hours. Had he but known he could have saved 
himself the long journey to Alma, as the voices which he had heard 
were those of the belated troops following a cold trail. He had 
thought from the distance that they were the same or another gang 
of Apaches. 

Further on Welsh came to the ranch of the Luther Brothers, 
two young Swedes. The ranch-house had been burned. The Chir- 
icahuas had caught the two unarmed. They did not wish to waste 
Government cartridges on unarmed men, so they overpowered the 
Luthers, threw them into a clump of cacti and beat them to death 
with cobbles, crushing in their skulls, and frightfully mangling the 
dead. Welsh had thought that safety and aid might be had at the 
ranch of the Luthers. All that was left was the forlorn hope of 
trudging on to Alma, on the upper waters of the San Francisco. 
He crawled the last six miles into that little settlement. 

The day before his arrival Wood Dodd had reached Alma and 
sent word to Clifton that the Apaches were out. Unknowingly, 
he had passed by Welsh, while the latter lay concealed. Dodd had 



106 RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 

been on a hunting trip on Eagle creek. He was a good sign 
reader, and, recognizing that a spring raid was on, he struck the 
trail, attempting to overtake the Chiricahuas, as he had a good 
horse, pass them by a short cut, and warn the scattered ranchers of 
the oncoming danger. He succeeded in part. Near Alma the trail 
deflected to the left, and Dodd reached the village a few hours be- 
fore Geronimo crossed the San Francisco river some miles above. 
In one place, following a hot trail, Dodd, from the brow of a hill, 
beheld the Apaches camped below. The Indians saw him at about 
the same time, and, thinking Dodd must have had a body of 
men with him, stampeded, leaving behind in their flight one of 
their ponies, a rifle or two, and blankets. 

in. 

As the summer approached, word of Apache deviltries came from 
all points of the compass. Now they were in the Mogollons. The 
next day near Silver City, or raiding the Gila, and a day or two 
later were seen near the San Bernardino ranch, heading for the 
fastness of the Chiricahua mountains, whence they could descend 
upon the little hamlets of Chihuahua and afterward make their 
escape into the Sierra Madre. They raided the Gila near Duncan, 
made a rendezvous at Ash Springs, picked up what stock they could 
about Solomonville, and dashed across the San Simon, with the 
soldiers always too late to intercept. It was the same old story of 
governmental ineffectiveness. A little gang of Indians had par- 
alyzed the military arm of the United States. We see the same 
thing to-day, when a few Boers have put a strain upon the British 
Empire, such as it has not borne since the time of the first 
Napoleon. 

Randall had been at Solomonville, buying stock when the raid 
began. That was why he had no part in the encounters which had 
caused the loss of the lives of Montgomery and Benton, and in 
which Welsh had been wounded. Eandall devoted the rest of the 
summer to a still hunt for Apaches, with some measure of success. 



FRATERNITY OF THE FRONTIER. 107 

The first head brought in, however, was by Montgomery ; no kin 
to the Montgomery who had been slain at the ranch on the Blue. 
It was that of a young buck, and was given a post of honor on the 
adobe corral of Pomeroy & Co. The ethics of the frontier are not 
those of the city, and they never can be reconciled. There was 
open rejoicing that one Indian had been slain. Welsh took a satis- 
faction of his own in regarding the head, and even Dandy seemed 
to delight in passing the corral that he might take a sidelong glance 
at what had once been a foe. 

We raised a purse for Montgomery, and, for a little community, 
it was a good one, and it did not take so many hours as there were 
hundreds in the purse to secure the coin. 

Strange accounts of this affair reached the outside world through 
the wires and the big dailies from East and West came back with a 
weird story of the head of the Apache fastened above the headlight 
of the engine, which ran on the narrow gauge from Clifton to 
Lordsburg. It was before the day of the newspaper wash-drawing, 
or the grinning skull would have been pictured on the engine. 

This story was untrue, which fact pained the frontier. I can 
vouch for its untruthfulness, for I was there. But! after the head 
had ornamented the adobe wall of the stable sufficiently long, it 
was thrown into the river. An eddy cast it upon a sandbar at 
South Clifton, where a drove of Mexican hogs discovered it. 

IV. 

The river began to dry with the long summer days, and ^ the 
water in the fiume ran low. Yet there was the ceaseless drip 
which nourished a rank vegetation beside the rotting boards, and 
the pools festered in the sun. 

Then came a strange epidemic which followed down the flume. 
The first house in North Clifton was the first visited, and death 
was with the visit. Then, like a canvasser, skippino- none, the sick- 
ness went from house to house. 

Those below laughed because, for the most part, North Clifton 



108 



RAGTIME PHILOSOPHY. 



was inhabited by Mexicans, and the people of the town proper 
thought they were exempt. But the epidemic, if such it was, kept 
its steady march. Because we were above the flume on a high shelf 
of rock, and because we were white, Stevens and Welsh and I felt 
safe when the last house on the upper sandbar had known the un- 
welcome visitant, and the sickness had crossed the river to work its 
evil on the other side. 

People began to leave Clifton then. The smelters were almost 
idle, and were there not other camps? They were not fleeing as 
from a plague. It was merely a change to better surroundings. 
The doctors declared that the sickness was malaria in an aggravated 
form, and when quinine failed prescribed arsenic. 

It crossed the river again, visited the jail, hewed out of solid 
rock, the railroad office, the old store of the Arizona Copper Com- 
pany, the concentrator, and returned up the flume to pay our adobe 
a call. That was why Stevens took his mule and guns for a 
hunting trip on Eagle, why some others and I went to the Metcalf 
mine, and why Welsh and Dandy went I know not where. 




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2 3 130* 



PR 22 1902 








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